Imagemagick or other command line image tools

General system Applications
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I love imagemagick. I have modest image processing needs mostly converting files to different formats and compiling them into pdfs resizing and with different backgrounds which imagemagick does without a problem. Sometimes though, I have specific needs like autocropping so I search on the internet and find imagemagick does that too. Everytime I have a special need, imagemagick is there with a solution. It seems to have endless capabilities.

I have, however, also come across graphicsmagick and now libvips. One of the big criticisms of the first two seems to be huge numbers of dependencies while libvips seems a leaner piece of software (I have not used it). Imagemagick meets all my needs presently but I would be interested to hear what others might have to recommend.

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I like Imagemagick a lot – it’s perfect when you need to process a bunch of images in a batch.

However, it’s not the easiest tool to learn, and sometimes the results are of inferior quality, unless one gets the options just right. Lots of trial and error is needed to get good results consistently.

I mainly use it for rotating, cropping, fixing perspective, converting between formats and colour correction. For anything slightly more advanced, I use GIMP, since editing images on the command line has its limits.

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