kerbtier

in webapps you often need to manipulate images. create thumbnails, add shadows or borders, create captchas and many other things. usually i use imagemagick. it’s a very powerfull image manipulation tool with apis for many languages. i often experienced some difficulties when trying to use it with a specific language. there i usually almost no documentation for the apis and it looks like it’s not a lot used. many tend to call the imagemackig executable trough a os call.

how is it with python

i found a few image magick python modules. most were completely undocumented, unfinished or more or less uninstallable (at least on a 64 bit debian). the one who works properly is PythonMagick. i first tried to install the lattest version but due to some dependencies problems it wasn’t possible on my ubuntu system. there is a deb package available which was easyli installed with: sudo apt-get install python-pythonmagick it’s not the latest version but it worked ok, at least for my needs.

how do you use it

i found no documentation for it but it was quite simple to figure out the basic things. there is documentation for Magick++ which is a object oriented wrapper around imagemagick. all the image methods have short descriptions. to add a red 2 pixel border to an image for example you need following code: from PythonMagick import Image i = Image('example.jpg') # reades image and creates an image instance i.borderColor("#ff0000") # sets border paint color to red i.border("2x2") # paints a 2 pixel border i.write("out.jpg") # writes the image to a file the parameter “2×2″ of the border method is a geometry string used by imagemagick as input for many methods. another example who crops the image, flips it, adds an oil paint look and finally save it as a png. i = Image('example.jpg') i.crop("100x100+25+25") i.flip() i.oilPaint(2) i.save('out.png') if i find some spare time i will add a few more complex examples of how to use imagemagick from python.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under development, python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.