Installing ImageMagick from yum or source

[[SCUM] McPhil]

ImageMagick is software to create, edit and handle bitmap images. It can read, modify, convert, and write images in 100's of formats. You can use ImageMagick from the command line of your server to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves. Some website software require your server to have ImageMagick binaries for the software to work properly.

Installing ImageMagick can be difficult for the linux novice. Most linux packages already have ImageMagick available, you simply just need to install it. This only caveat is that your linux package may not have the most up to date version available so you need to decide if you can use the version available on your server, or do you need the cutting edge or bleeding edge version of ImageMagick available. At the time of this post, ImageMagick's latest linux version available is v6.5.2-10 if you can install from the rpm source or tarball. The version of CentOS 5 I am using includes v6.2.8.0-4 which is fine for my current needs.

If your reasons are the same as mine and you need ImageMagick installed on your server now, read on. Open a shell, login as root or login as your user and su to root. at the prompt type:

yum install ImageMagick

You're done.

If you need to see if it's installed or If you need a more current version of ImageMagick, you need to check if your server currently has a version already installed and what version it is.

rpm -q ImageMagick

or

rpm -qa | grep -i ImageMagick

or

convert -version (this give you a bit more information on the version you have installed or the version you just installed)

So, back to installing a newer version. Assuming you didn't install the older version, go the ImageMagick.org website and local the .tar.gz file you need. Open a shell and login as root, type:

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.5.2-4.tar.gz

or whatever the latest version is you need. Once the file finishes transferring to your server, follow this protocol:

tar -xzf ImageMagick-6.5.2-4.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.5.2-4
./configure
make
make check
make install

'tar -xzf' will open the tarball (similar to a zip file but not... ) and will create a new folder called ImageMagick which will contact all the necessary installation files.

cd = change directory. You need to enter the newly created directory to configure, make and install it.

Run 'convert -version' to make sure your new version installed and can be detected. You're done. Enjoy. -McPhil