imagick is a native php-extension that provides a wrapper to the ImageMagick / GraphicsMagick library. You need the ImageMagick libraries from www.imagemagick.org or GraphicsMagick libraries from www.graphicsmagick.org to get it running. ImageMagick 6 support is EXPERIMENTAL.

Note: I am aware of another php module implementing Imagemagick functions (MagickWand for PHP from imagemagick developers) but for my project this was not a solution and I just needed a functional version of imagick module running on top of Debian Etch (with apache 2.2.3 and php 5.2).

The reason for my previous post “Install ImageMagick 5.5.7 on Debian” was to prepare the installation of the imagick php module, so once we have installed ImageMagick 5 from source we can proceed with the php module installation. The actual installation is very simple and anyone that has previously installed php extensions will see no difference (the only special thing was to build it against the ImageMagick 5 we installed previously).

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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.

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