Guide On How To Install ImageMagick On FreeBSD

A step by step guide on how to install ImageMagick on FreeBSD

For most people the GD library will be enough, but every once in a while you will stumble over someone or something that needs ImageMagick.

I don’t wanna go into what’s best GD or ImageMagick i’m not familiar enough on how these to applications differ. But anyway it’s very easy to install ImageMagick.

ImageMagick is available for download in various versions here ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick

In this example I’ll use ImageMagick-6.6.7-6 which is the latest release at the time of writing. If you downloaded another version just replace 6.6.7-6 with that the procedure is the same despite what version you are want to use. Once downloaded we need to extract and install it.

As root

tar -zxvf ImageMagick-6.6.7-6.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.6.7-6

Now for most people the standard “.configure” will be ok and no further arguments are needed. If you need to add functions apart from the standard you should take a look at the “install-unix.txt” file residing in the ImageMagick-6.6.7-6 directory.

As root

./configure

The configuration process will only takes a few seconds whereas the “make” will take a considerable amount of time no mater what hardware you are doing this on.

As root

make install clean

In order to check if everything is as it should be we can perform a simple test.

As root

/usr/local/bin/convert logo: logo.gif

If this runs without errors ImageMagick is installed and running and you can delete the ImageMagick-6.6.7-6.tar.gz file if you like.

As root

rm ImageMagick-6.6.7-6.tar.gz

Official Imagemagick Site