Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Hi I'm a total newbie to ImageMagick and to any form of development apart from scripting IDEs. I can't get ImageMagick started on my Mac. I am running Snow Leopard and have all the extras downloaded. I'm trying to use the MacPorts route. I installed the package OK, and wanted to follow these instructions from the IM site:

We recommend MacPorts which custom builds ImageMagick in your environment. Download MacPorts and type:

$magick> sudo port install ImageMagick

But I couldn't see where to type. I tried using Terminal and got errors and I looked for MacPorts in Utilities and Applications on my Mac but it wasn't there. This is stupid of me, but can anyone explain what I did wrong. I guess I'm not in the MacOS equivalent of Kansas any more.

TIA

First you need to install MacPorts. You need to go to the MacPorts web site and follow their instructions.

You should then be able to open the terminal and at your prompt type:

sudo port install ImageMagick

The sudo will require your admin password.

I believe that this installs from source, so you probably want to install any image delegate libraries (such as for tiff, png, ghostscript, freetype, jpg, etc) from MacPorts before installing ImageMagick. See the list of some suggested delegates at http://www.imagemagick.org/download/delegates/, but get them from MacPorts so that all your delegates and IM are in the same place so IM can find them.


I am on Mac OSX Tiger and have installed all my delegates from MacPorts. I have installed IM manually so that I can keep up with changes, but this is more complicated. You are better starting off getting everthing you need from MacPorts. Installing delegates manually is a real pain as each one needs some other supporting delegate. MacPorts knows about these dependencies and installs them all for you. Much easier.

I thought I **had** installed MacPorts, and I tried to do exactly what I was told to do, with the IM binary not the source. But so far no luck. I will try again tomorrow. What I do know is that IM will not end up looking like an ordinary Mac app, but something much more like a Unix thingy with a command-line interface. I won't mind that as long as I can find a step-by-step guide for using it. This is after all the users' forum, and everyone else must have got IM going. I just wonder how.

livfoss wrote:I thought I **had** installed MacPorts, and I tried to do exactly what I was told to do, with the IM binary not the source. But so far no luck. I will try again tomorrow. What I do know is that IM will not end up looking like an ordinary Mac app, but something much more like a Unix thingy with a command-line interface. I won't mind that as long as I can find a step-by-step guide for using it. This is after all the users' forum, and everyone else must have got IM going. I just wonder how.

I believe that MacPorts installs from source and not binary. But I am not sure of that.

IM does run from the command line, but on Mac/Unix there is a simplified GUI interface that you can access once you display an image in X environment. For example using the internal IM image logo:, do

display logo:

then left click on the image and a menu will pop-up from which to choose some simple operations.

For the novice user who wants to learn the command line processing, see

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/comma ... -tools.php
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/comma ... essing.php
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/comma ... ptions.php

And the many examples at
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/