I’ve been putting together a small “Field Guide” for ImageMagick. It’s meant to be a concise reference of commands that actually work in day-to-day use.

The first draft covers common tasks like resizing, optimizing GIFs, and stacking images, with short explanations for each flag.

I plan to expand it over time and create similar guides for other tools I use a lot, like Git and Docker. The idea is to build fast, reliable references for developers who just want to get things done. I also plan to release them in book form so you can read through, pick up a few “aha” insights, and keep it handy for the tasks you do often.

If that sounds useful, checkout the draft and signup to get updates as I finish it.

HTML: https://joeldare.com/imagemagick-field-guide.html PDF: https://joeldare.com/imagemagick-field-guide.pdf ePub: https://joeldare.com/imagemagick-field-guide.epub

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Is this AI generated?

The "Conventions Used in This Guide" sound like your instructions.

    Use input.png and output.jpg as the filenames (extensions can change as needed).
    Put one switch on each line.
    Use future tense such as "optimize" instead of "optimizes" or "optimized".
    Use AP style heading capitalization.
    Use the newer magick command instead of the older convert command.
    Arbitrarily organize into what I think are the most likely use cases.

Great if this is working for you and helps you to recall basic usage when using IM once in a blue moon.

For any serious work this is inadequate (see † below), as the defaults, which are relied on here pretty extensively, are inevitably giving fair to middling results on specific tasks.

Moreover, imagemagick has an extensive documentation that's open to contribution and could possibly benefit from more usage examples for beginners: https://imagemagick.org/script/magick.php

†: For example, when you don't have strict control over input formats, you start adding things like

   -define tiff:ignore-layers=true "INPUT[0]"

to guarantee you're working on the whole composite image.

Another thing you're bound to bump into pretty soon is transparency so you need to decide how you're going to deal with it. Color profiles is a minefield and it's a blessing when you can just ignore them completely but a pain when you can't.

Then, exporting to web mostly means downscaling, and here you need to decide whether you're prioritizing image detail preservation or size optimization. In any case, resampling in a linear colorspace is strongly recommended:

  -colorspace RGB -filter X -resize N> -colorspace sRGB

But check if it works with the chosen filter first! I spent an hour hunting the source of randomly appearing hot pixels on the downscaled images from noisy sources when using LUV for processing.

The point is, basic one-liners hide the complexity. For any workflow that requires robustness and fidelity a deep dive into the documentation is a requirement.