There are times when you might have need for converting between different image formats. This is pretty easy to accomplish in Linux with the ImageMagick software utility suite. ImageMagick is the swiss-army knife of command line image manipulation tools. It’s fast, efficient and easy to use.
To check whether it’s already installed, run the following command.
$which convert
This will display the location of the convert binary, if imagemagick is installed. If not, install it using the following command:
$sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Usage
To convert between different image formats, we use the convert
utility. Run
the following command.
$ convert example.png example.jpg
This command will convert example.png
to example.jpg
. You can use any name
for the output image file. The general command is as follows.
$ convert input_file [options] output_file
You can also resize your images.
$ convert example.jpg -resize 500x200 example-result.jpg
convert
will try to preserve the aspect ratio of the image.
If you want to change the quality of your images, this is also possible.
$ convert example.png -quality 90 example-new.jpg
You may want to do this if you have, say a large .png
file that you want to
convert to a smaller jpg
file. In this case, you will reduce the quality of
the original png
file and then convert to the smaller jpg
file.
You can rotate images too.
$ convert example.png -rotate 90 example.png
convert
also allows you to create GIFs. If you have several jpg
files in
some directory, you can make them into a gif using the following command.
$ convert *.jpg test.gif
convert
is a nifty tool that offers a plethora of options for manipulating your
images. We’ve barely scratched the surface, there’s still so much more that if
offers.
Check the convert man page to learn more of its features and use cases