BilikFamily.com

Imagemagick - I was driving home from work tonight and was listening to one of my favorite tech oriented podcasts, MacBreakWeekly. This was episode #77. As they do every week, they went around the round table asking each contributor for their "Pick of the Week". Soon I hear contributor Scott Bourne make a recommendation for the Imagemagick program suite. I excerpted this piece of the discussion as an MP3 here so you don't have to listen to the whole hour and 20 minute long show.

Imagemagick is one of the earliest tools I used when I started doing website design in early 2001 and I still use it all the time. I typically do all the hand editing of the high resolution pictures in Photoshop Elements or the GIMP. That directory is later used for getting nice paper prints at ShutterFly. I then make a duplicate of that directory and use Imagemagick to scale down the images down to fit on a typical screen and turn down the quality factor to be quicker loading and "web ready". Dial-up modem friendly has been something I've often strived for with the website. I then run a Perl script that makes an HTML photo album of the directory. It again utilizes Imagemagick to make the small one inch thumbnails that appear in the overview photo reel style index sheet. I also wrote a Perl script which runs daily and selects two random photos for the day. It uses Imagemagick to make the small black and white thumbnails that appear on the front page of BilikFamily.com.

Heavens knows that when I started using it, Imagemagick was already an old program. Seven years later I just keep plugging away with it because it is so easy to use where you want programatic changes to images, like scale, crop, blend, convert, adjust, etc. That's why I was pleasantly surprised to hear it described as a "pick of the week", which tend to be things that have come out recently.