

ImageMagick provides a fast, simple way to automate image resizing.
#GRAPHICMAGICK OR IMAGEMAGIC DOWNLOAD#
Otherwise, look for it in your favorite package manager, or download it directly from the ImageMagick website.
#GRAPHICMAGICK OR IMAGEMAGIC INSTALL#
If you use Homebrew on a Mac, you can install it like this: brew install imagemagick It’s also available on desktop systems (Mac, Windows and Linux). It is widely supported by content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal, integrated with task runners such as Grunt, and used on its own to automate image editing - including resizing. ImageMagick has been around for almost 25 years and is a full-fledged command-line image editor. A bunch of tools out there do this, including GD and GraphicsMagick, but ImageMagick strikes a good balance between power and availability in hosting environments. This is where automated image resizing comes in handy. But what about a large website with a lot of images? An online store, for example, might have hundreds or thousands of image assets, and having to create different sizes of each of these is an enormous task. Responsive images to the rescue! Right? Well, yes, but first we have to generate our responsive image assets, and we have to make sure those assets look good and have a small enough footprint to improve the website’s performance.įor a very small website, saving a few different sizes of each image directly in our image editor is trivial - Photoshop even provides a handy “Save for Web” option that keeps file sizes low. (Image: HTTP Archive) ( View large version) The average web page is 2,099 KB, 1,310 KB of which comes from images. Improving web performance and giving a better experience to our users is our job as developers and designers. Even on a fast connection, a 2 MB website can wreak havoc on your users’ data plans and cost them real money. At the same time, millions of people are accessing the Internet on 3G-or-worse connections that make a 2 MB website a horror show to use. The average web page is about 2 MB in size, and about two thirds of that weight is from images.
