ImageMagic vs. GD

[Vin DSL]

Gosh! I just had a great conversation with myself, over in 'General Support' and I thought I would share. It was in a rather obscure thread, so I thought I would move the 'conversation' over here. Your thoughts would be appreciated...

Originally posted by mikethechap
Is anyone on Neutron using ImageMagick? If so, does anyone know what the path is to it?

Originally posted by Vin DSL
I just spent 5 days in php hell, porting some frenchman's botched hack of Coppermine Photo Gallery to PHP-Nuke 6.5. However, it's been worth it, I guess. If there's a better gallery proggie out there for Nuke, I haven't found it.

After I finally got Coppermine working, for some reason this 'bish' from hell wouldn't allow uploading of GIF files to Neutron using GD 2. Probably another bug in Coppermine. So, I decided to use ImageMagick instead of GD and it's working fine.

Anyway, after trying to qualify several paths to 'mogify' on Neutron, the ones that finally worked were simply:

/usr/bin/

or...

/usr/bin/X11/

If anyone wants to check out ImageMagick on Neutron, and see how true the colors are compared to GD, or whatever, go here and upload a pic:

http://www.lenon.com/modules.php?name=coppermine

It should accept JPG/GIF/PNG/TIFF files with GIF/PNG/JPG/JPEG/TIF/TIFF extensions. Let me know if you have any problems...

EDIT - OMG!!! I was just playing around with Coppermine. Forget TIFF files. Those things are huge.

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Hey, look everyone! I'm replying to myself.

Isn't the Internet a funny place? I was just doing a little research on ImageMagick vs. GD and it would appear that GIF is still a propietary compression scheme, after all these years. That is, lawyers are suing ppl for patent infringement when they use GIF files without their permission.

Evidently, GIF was taken out of GD after version 1.2 (when PNG was added). One of the ways ImageMagick gets around the proprietary compression format of GIF's is by not compressing them. If thumbnails are set large enough, for instance, GIF thumbnails could actually be larger than the original full-sized (compressed) GIF image.

Hrm... so, that would explain why I can't process GIF's with Coppermine using GD 2.x on Neutron, but they work with ImageMagick. Apologies to the folks at Coppermine...

Live 'n' learn...

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Here's proof:

GD:

http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/GD/

ImageMagick:

http://www.imagemagick.org

Quoting the ImageMagick web page:

GIF - CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format

8-bit RGB PseudoColor with up to 256 palette entires. Specify the format "GIF87" to write the older version 87a of the format.

Note that since Unisys claims a patent on the LZW algorithm (expiring in the US as of June 2003) used by GIF, ImageMagick binary distributions do not include support for the LZW algorithm so GIF files are written uncompressed. Users are recommended to use the PNG or JPEG formats instead, and should consult the Unisys LZW web page before enabling LZW support.

Would anyone like to add to the discussion?!?!?!?

[rifrafs]

Sure Good Afternoon Vic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mattsiegman]

The patent expires this month

[empty]

Personally, I like using NetPBM for my "image adjustment" needs ;D

Oh, and big a big w00t to the patent ending this month ;D. Maybe that'll = gif coming back to GD ;D

[mattsiegman]

.PNG is a much superior format to .GIF, it has Alpha Transparency, no color limit and better compression. Unfortunately, MS decided that they would make IE suck and didn't include full PNG support, thereby screwing over every webdesigner who wanted alpha transparency the easy way.