ImageMagick Command-line suite for creating, converting, and editing raster images

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a free, open-source software suite for displaying, creating, converting, and editing raster images from the command line. It handles well over 200 image formats and can resize, crop, rotate, recolor, composite, and batch-process images without ever opening a GUI — which makes it a natural fit for build scripts, web backends, and one-off cleanups of a folder full of photos.

magick input.jpg -resize 50% output.jpg      # shrink an image by half
magick input.png -quality 85 output.jpg       # convert format + set quality
magick mogrify -resize 800x800 *.jpg          # batch-resize a whole folder

Getting Started

Install ImageMagick and understand the magick command.

Common Operations

Resize, crop, convert, compress, watermark, and batch-process images.

Command Reference

A dense cheat sheet of the flags covered throughout these docs.

Why ImageMagick?

  • It's scriptable. Every operation is a plain CLI invocation, so it drops straight into shell scripts, Makefiles, CI pipelines, and cron jobs — no GUI, no manual clicking through a batch of files.
  • It reads and writes almost anything. JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, GIF, HEIC, PDF, SVG, and 200+ other formats are supported, so it doubles as a universal format converter.
  • One binary, many tools. Since version 7, magick is the single entry point for what used to be separate convert, identify, mogrify, composite, and montage binaries, invoked as subcommands.
  • It's not just a viewer. Under the hood it's a full image-processing library (MagickWand / MagickCore) with bindings for PHP, Python, Node, Perl, Ruby, and more — the CLI is the same engine most language bindings wrap.

Install

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S imagemagick

Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt install imagemagick

Fedora:

sudo dnf install ImageMagick

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install imagemagick

See Getting Started for Windows, verifying the install, and the difference between the modern magick command and the legacy convert/mogrify binaries.

These pages are independent, community-style reference documentation for ImageMagick. They are not affiliated with the ImageMagick project. For the canonical reference, see the official command-line documentation.