I'm also working on image upload feature.
I got suggested that Image Magick should be used for that task. I also heard about netpbm & GD.pm.
Which image management tool is better? I want to manage gif & jpg, mainly resize, get image properties.

Just installed Image Magick, when I saw your post.
Any experience?

P.S.: please deteach my post into a separate thread, if you feel it offtopic.

Best regards,
Webmaster33

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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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Well, I'm just going to do:
- one-time image processing
- only thumbnail generation, maybe addition of some kind of text like watermark

Well, I like Image-Magick, because it has easy-to-install binary release for Windows, while netpbm requires using Mingw32 and GNU Bash. So cross-platform development I do a fine Windows release is necessary.

http://archive.develooper.com/macosx@perl.org/msg03943.html
"The downside to NetPBM is that all of the tools work with only the
PBM or PPM formats, so you need to get your images into this format
first. But there's usually a NetPBM tool to convert your image into
PBM, as well as to convert it from PBM to your desired final format
after you've manipulated it."

Also is there a Perl API for netpbm? I did not see any... And using system() or backticks (`command`) is not a good idea.
Image Magick has several ones like Image::Magick, PerlMagick, Apache::ImageMagick.

Finally how about GD package?

Best regards,
Webmaster33

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