I am a devoted Adobe user but I do love using ImageMagick in the terminal for large image based projects when PhotoShop would just be too time consuming. Before going full Mac I used to always use ImageMagick with Ubuntu and there is a scriptable image processing system, known as SIPS, that comes standard on the Mac but today I will show you how to install ImageMagick.
First thing you have to do before installing ImageMagick is go to Apple's app store and download Xcode. Beware that Xcode is a timely install so make sure to schedule time to download and install the app.
Some write-ups I have referenced while installing software in the past do recommend installing MacPorts but I prefer using Homebrew.
First thing you need to do is open a terminal window through the terminal app located in Applications -> Utilities -> terminal.app. I like to make sure I'm not in a directory so I run cd for the root location. From the website Homebrew copy the line of code under Install Homebrew and paste it in your terminal:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
After you've pressed return to continue you should get an Installation successful! message within the terminal.
We want to make sure there weren't any issues in the installation of Homebrew so we will be running brew doctor and if any broken symlinks are found you will be requested to run brew prune
After brew prune I make sure that brew is up to date with brew update
If you want to can verify Homebrew installed or if you want to learn more about Homebrew run the command man brew to get Homebrew's manual. If you do decide to read Homebrew's manual and are wanting to exit said manual just type the q button to exit.
After verifying or reading the manual let's clean up brew with brew cleanup.
We didn't forget about ImageMagick so let's get to the fun part by installing ImageMagick with:
brew install imagemagick --disable-openmp --build-from-source
If the install went well you should now be able to access ImageMagick's man page convert with man convert.
After the installation I prefer to remove the package files from the installation directory under Homebrew but that isn't required. If you would like to know where they are you can see them with cd /Library/Caches/Homebrew then with ls
To remove the .tar.xz package file you could do it the complicated way by typing it out or you can highlight the text and copy it, then run
rm imagemagick-6.9.0-10.tar.xz
You should have a successful installation of ImageMagick on your box. To play with ImageMagick create a dummy folder, point your terminal to said dummy folder, place some images in it and have fun. To learn all the powers of ImageMagick you can reference ImageMagick's command-Line Tools or reference StackOverflow's tag ImageMagick .
