I did, since this can be a heated topic.

Oddly, I had a customer in the store saturday, and we were discussing Image Magic vs netpbm.

I like netpbm since it's easier to install. Many hosts are now providing Image Magik, so it might be moot, but the overhead for Image Magik makes it almost a dedicated server thing.

If you are going to do any _serious_ image manipulation, you should have a dedicated machine, since it takes massive amounts of RAM to manipulate images, and if you have to use disk, you kill your entire system. The image machine should simply write the files back to the server machine for the next operations (it should have the server as part of it's file system).

For one-time processing of an uploaded graphic, logo, file attachment or such, it's not a real issue. But for any sort of dynamic image processing it becomes a _major_ issue really fast.

The other advantage of netpbm is you can only install the filters you need, thereby limiting disk space, and potential unauthorized use.


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