ImageMagick includes a number of command-line utilities for manipulating images. Most of you are probably accustomed to editing images one at a time with a graphical user interface (GUI) with such programs as Gimp or Photoshop. However, a GUI is not always convenient. Suppose you want to process an image dynamically from a web script or you want to apply the same operations to many images or repeat a specific operation at different times to the same or different image. For these types of operations, the command-line image processing utility is appropriate.

The ImageMagick command-line tools exit with a status of 0 if the command line arguments have a proper syntax and no problems are encountered. Expect a descriptive message and an exit status of 1 if any exception occurs such as improper syntax, a problem reading or writing an image, or any other problem that prevents the command from completing successfully.

Here is a short description for each command-line tool. Click on the program name to get details about the program usage and a list of command-line options that alters how the program behaves. If you are just getting acquainted with ImageMagick, start with the magick program. Be sure to peruse Anthony Thyssen's tutorial on how to use ImageMagick utilities to create, edit, compose, or convert images from the command-line.

magick convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. magick-script use this scripting language interpreter to convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more.

We also support sub-commands for compatibility with ImageMagick version 6:

Your installation may have direct ImageMagick version 6 compatibility links. If so, you can access the tools directly by referring to them by name. For example,