Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

GM is a fork. It's actually one of the more persistent and notable forks in the open source community. Both projects continue development and have no interest in reconciliation.

View on HN

The last I heard about Image Magick was that it was out-dated and people were suggesting using other tools (though I don't remember what). Can anyone comment on that? This might have been only for a few specific tasks, not for Image Magick as a whole.

I don't know about now, but I've encountered significant issues with it every time I've attempted to use it in the last three years. To be fair, I was attempting to use it through wrappers - I had a particularly bad run trying to get around issues with both rmagick and minimagick in ruby, and later on a different project with wand in python. Though, with wand, the issues I encountered there were mostly with getting a buildpack working for it on Heroku.

Regardless, whether it's my incompetence or imagemagick itself, I don't have very good associations with the library.

GraphicsMagick fixed all the memory and CPU problems that ImageMagick was giving us in a large wiki farm production environment. That alone is a reason to switch to it.

do you have a covering blog post about that?

Unfortunately not. That occurred back under different management when talking about internal infrastructure changes was discouraged.

I switched to GraphicsMagick a few years ago too. I find that its command line options make more sense and that it produces better results. I do ad-hoc tests from time to time and and the difference between the two isn't earth shattering, but I get the feeling that GraphicsMagick is a better project for some reason (maybe it was something I read once).

Imagemagick does support some more advanced features such as deep colors, perceptually uniform color spaces (cielab) which graphicsmagick does not.

As I understand it some of the IM features are important for scientific image processing, HDRI or deep processing pipelines where rounding errors could accumulate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com