ImageMagick is a set of programs to manipulate various image formats (JPEG, TIFF, PhotoCD, PBM, XPM, etc…). All manipulations can be achieved through shell commands as well as through an X11 graphical interface. Possible effects: colormap manipulation, channel operations, thumbnail creation, image annotation, limited drawing, image distortion, etc…

Normally with any software I will try to use the latest available version because: the application should be better in newer versions, should be maintained more actively for security issues compared to legacy versions, etc.
Still in this case, I had to install several times an older version of ImageMagick. Why? Not for the application itself, but because of some applications that relied on the php wrapper (the imagick pecl module). This compiles fine with ImageMagick 6, but many functions fail. So in order to have the php module working properly I had to first install imagemagick 5 that is the last version the php module works fine.

Read the rest of this entry »