Imagick转换vs imagick PHP

Question

So I built a site that creates thumbnails using a php script that uses imagick for thumbnail creation. On my personal web host (Hostmonster), this works fine. When I made a copy of my site and uploaded it to my client's site (hosted on domain.com) it failed. Asking Domain.com what was up, they said:

"We have ImageMagick binaries. But it is not complied to PHP so IMAGICK won’t work. So, you will not be able to use IMAGICK as PHP built-in class. You have to use the alternative ‘convert’ utility"

I've never used the "convert utility" before, so I'm not sure what they're talking about. Should I look into this more? Or fire them and just stick with my original host (Hostmonster) where imagick works in PHP? I feel like I should know about this alternative to be more well-rounded in my knowledge, but wondering if its worth my time to learn it, or just forget it and move on.

Suggestions about how to go forward, or resources on this alternative would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

What they are talking about is using PHP's exec() function to execute ImageMagick the same way as you would do it from the command line. There are hundreds of examples on SO of using ImageMagick from the command line, just search for ImageMagick and convert which is the name of the main binary you would use at the command line.

The syntax is pretty simple:

convert input.png ...<processing> ... output.png

So, you might do

convert input.jpg -thumbnail x320 -quality 80 result.png

If you want to do that in PHP, your ISP is suggesting you use:

$cmd = "/usr/local/bin/convert '/path/to/input.jpg' -thumbnail x320 -quality 80 '/path/to/result.png'";
exec($cmd, $output, $retval);

I can't really comment on the relative efficiency, merits or otherwise (though it smacks of laziness or incompetence on their part), but it should work fine.