ImageMagick is a software that allows editing and manipulating many image formats.

In the market, a wide variety of programs allow us to modify images using a user interface. This is very useful, although there are times when we want to modify the images without having to make the changes manually. That is to say, sometimes we want to change the images by running a series of commands in our operating system's terminal.

ImageMagick is composed of a series of commands that allows the manipulation of image files. Thanks to these commands, we can convert the format of the images (e.g., from GIF to PNG), crop, reduce/enlarge, rotate, combine multiple images, insert text, and many more actions.

We need to download the package appropriate to our operating system (Windows, Linux, or Mac) to install the program. Once installed, we need to access the terminal and type in “convert.” All the options of the program will be displayed. As we can observe, there are many options, so we will need to use some tutorials or buy one of the books which explain the use of this program in detail.

Because it is a program that runs from the command line, we probably need to install it as a requirement of other software. That is to say; it is possible that when we install one program, it requires us to install ImageMagick on our PC.
For the programmers, there are libraries in different programming languages (Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C, etc.) that allow us to incorporate the functions of image manipulation of this software in the programming routines.

In addition to the “convert” command, which is the main program's command, and that allows us to make any manipulations on images, there are 2 other commands that we will be able to use:

• identify : this command shows information about the graphic file. For example, if we run “identify photo.png,” it will display the information about the file “photo.png.” This information includes resolution, size (bytes), format, depth of color, and more.

• display : this command opens the image file indicated. In addition, it also allows us to apply a series of effects and modifications on the image: rotations; modification of the brightness, saturation; grayscale, zoom, adding frame, reduction noise, and more.
  To run this command, we must type in the terminal: “display picture.png.”
  We must remember that in Windows, this command is called “imdisplay.”

The possibilities this software offers to manipulate images are endless, so learning to manage this software will take time and dedication. So we don't recommend this program for those users who don't have some experience with the command line of the system or don't have enough patience to learn how to use the commands of this program since this program has not been developed to offer an advanced graphical interface where we can apply all the functionalities of the software.

The software is free and open source.