ImageMagick
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“I used to make little meme generators with imagemagick before those were a thing”
“I have devolved a lot of tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines”
Show 2 more
“I love ImageMagick. I've used it a few times to make a PDF look scanned.”
“Conversions on the command line are simple enough with imagemagick.”
Caveats and dissent
“We are also in the process of moving away from Magick to Vips”
“there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs”
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“Unsandboxed ImageMagick is known for being a security nightmare”
“ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos 3 mentions
- JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases 1 mention
- Apple iPod Engraver (2019) 1 mention
- Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage 1 mention
- Show HN: Palette Manipulator 1 mention
- Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) 1 mention
Data: imagemagick.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 16
“I have a Java application that relies on ImageMagick, which seems to use libheif for AVIF rather than libavif (avifenc).”
“We are also in the process of moving away from Magick to Vips”
“there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs”
“Unsandboxed ImageMagick is known for being a security nightmare”
“I used to make little meme generators with imagemagick before those were a thing”
“ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)”
“Imagemagick (unable to handle animated PNGs)”
“build out ffmpeg/imagemagick image/video resizing”
“I use ImageMagick hocus pocus to defeat them with trivial ease”
“I have devolved a lot of tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines”
“one of the last rules about using imageMagick for comparison”
“I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.”
“and the rest I do with imagemagick”
“when i wanted to add borders to photos I took to upload to IG i used imagemagick”
“I love ImageMagick. I've used it a few times to make a PDF look scanned.”
“Conversions on the command line are simple enough with imagemagick.”