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PerlMagick (6.54)

excellent package ! excellent lib

franco64 - 2009-08-05 11:08:38
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PerlMagick (6.32)

is usefully

n.snake - 2007-03-13 22:26:00
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PerlMagick (6.40)

ImageMagick is a feature rich, but heavy library. GD is better for simple tasks. And the interface is not perlish.

But the below review "was" (Edited per Lee Goddard's update :) misleading, since ImageMagick does have a QueryFontMetrics() method:

($x_ppem, $y_ppem, $ascender, $descender, $width, $height, $max_advance) = $image->QueryFontMetrics(parameters);

Burak Gürsoy - 2006-08-04 06:31:24
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PerlMagick (6.24)

PerlMagick (Image::Magick) is the perl XS interface to the powerful, Photoshop-/Gimp-like image manipulation library housed at imagemagick.org.

Features include drawing routines, a huge number of filters - including a variety of user-definable kernel processors - TrueType font rendering, histogram extraction, profile- and metadata-manipulation, writing in a variety of formats.

Documentation in the Perl module is non-existant, and although it can be found on the web easily enough, it does not do the product justice. You may well find yourself reading the C API documentation to understand some of the functions, methods and arguments.

Error handling is most un-perlish, and should after the many years of this module's existance, have been improved.

Installation is always a pain in the neck: the Perl module requires you pre-install the Imagemagick.org binaries - on Win32l the PPM comes with the binaries, and not the other way around. Be sure to check you are using the correct 'quantum' version: Q8 is fast but Q16 provides more detailed understanding of colour.

In short, if you need to plot a few lines, use GD. If you haven't tried Imager (imager.perl.org), give it a shot before investing your time in Imagemagick.

(Kuszi, Burak for the QueryFontMetrics tip: proves my point about the docs ;-)

Lee Goddard - 2006-08-04 03:48:11
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PerlMagick (6.17)

Image::Magick is a powerful image processing tool and handles many formats. I have used it for making thumbnails and rounding the corners of images.

On the downside, it is significantly under-documented, and the ChangeLog file in the distribution stopped recording recent changes many versions ago. I have also experienced a number of a regressions with Image::Magick-- features quit working after an upgrade. Twice the functionality to created rounded corners has silently broken. Another time a particular kind of JPEG starting Image::Magick to run indefinitely. Yet another time, a trivial syntax change was needed after an upgrade which could have been avoided. Perhaps most seriously, it appears that after upgrading to 6.1.9, there was a bad memory leak that effectively took down a busy mod_perl enabled website which used it.

For these reasons, unless you need some cutting edge feature of Image::Magick, I recommend the Graphics::Magick fork. In my own testing, no code changes were needed besides the name change. Graphics::Magick has a focus on being more stable, and I believe it includes more automated tests in it's distribution.

Graphics::Magick is not on CPAN yet, but there are pre-made packages for many platforms that include the Perl module has part of the package.

Mark Stosberg - 2005-02-09 06:28:16
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PerlMagick (6.17)

Worderful work !

Aman Raheja - 2005-01-04 01:59:13
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PerlMagick (6.02)

It's great, i'm use it

manuel - 2004-08-24 12:26:26
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Image::Magick / PerlMagick (6.02)

So this is my favorite image manipulation library in perl. But frankly it has problems. It is often more difficult to install than it should be. It's interface is not in perlish. There are the occasional hidden gotchas in the interface. And the documentation is seriously lacking, on perl specific stuff. The general docs are fine.

All of this is outweighed by what it delivers, which is the most powerful, highest quality image manipulation library for perl. It's also available on a fairly wide range of platforms. On the balance a very good thing.

nathan mcfarland - 2004-08-10 12:47:18
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