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Comment by ImAnAmateur | Hacker News Reader

Any opinions on this tool? I've literally never heard of it before. Seems like it's good for simple bulk editing.

What curl is for network requests, this is for image operations. It is ubiquitous and pretty much a de-facto standard utility.

ImageMagick is the most widely used open source image processing library and tool in the world. The source code kinda sucks but it does everything you could want, pretty much

It is a common source of security vulnerabilities.

Also the API is has silly names, uses globals, not really nice, and not really FFI friendly (overcomplicated).

Also requires global installation, cannot be deployed side by side with projects.

For me it is a solid red flag for any project if they are using ImageMagick/GraphicsMagic. I don't let it near my computers.

Too bad it is already there...

What? Where?

What do you use, then? Netpbm?

Depends. libgd (has good API for FFI, van be side by side installed easily). ImageSharp (C#, very good, paid for commercial use). Sharp (JS). I use hugo's build in image tools. Sometimes a desktop app: Paint.Net. Affinity Photo. Whatever else suits my needs.

It parses complex payloads like images in code written using an unsafe language. It’s not an issue using it yourself with your own data but I’d be wary of putting it anywhere in a pipeline where it would be fed user provided data, e.g to generate thumbnails in a backend or similar.

To explain it succinctly, I shall refer you to XKCD #2347 https://xkcd.com/2347/

Indeed! Remember to hover over the XKCD image to see the punchline.

Imagemagick is like curl or openssl or ffmpeg or zlib. It's almost certainly living as a shared library on your computer somewhere.

Try ‘convert’ in your CLI of choice — you might have it installed already.

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