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Build any ImageMagick command — correctly, the first time

Pick a task, set the options, copy the command. It handles the two things every other guide gets wrong: IM7 magick vs IM6 convert, and shell quoting for the geometry flags ^ > < ! % that silently break on Windows.

✓ 80 commands verified by execution on a real install 100% local — nothing uploaded 0 dependencies, works offline

What this does

ImageMagick is on almost every server in the world and its command line is famously unforgiving. Options come in two kinds that behave differently, geometry arguments change meaning based on a single trailing character, and half the tutorials online are written for a version that renamed its main command five years ago.

This site builds the command for you, explains every flag it added, and gets the two environment details right that nothing else does:

  • ImageMagick 7 vs 6. IM7 renamed convert to magick. Flip the switch in the header and every command on every page rewrites itself.
  • Shell quoting. The geometry characters ^ > < ! and % are shell metacharacters. Unquoted, bash silently drops them and creates a stray file; cmd.exe treats ^ as an escape. Pick your shell in the header and commands are quoted correctly for it.

Every command here was executed before publishing

The builder's output was run against a real ImageMagick 6.9 install with Ghostscript — 80 command variants across all 16 tasks, all passing. That process found a genuine bug in an early version, where converting a large image straight to .ico failed because the format caps at 256×256. It is fixed, and the note explaining it is now on the page.

Pick a task

ImageMagick resize command generatorImageMagick crop command generatorImageMagick convert & compress command generatorImageMagick rotate and flip commandsImageMagick colour and tone commandsImageMagick sharpen and blur commandsImageMagick transparency and alpha channelImageMagick watermark command generatorImageMagick add text to imageImageMagick border, padding and shadowImageMagick combine and append imagesImageMagick PDF to image (and back)ImageMagick animated GIF commandsImageMagick favicon and icon set generatorImageMagick identify — read image informationImageMagick generate an image from scratch

Something broken?

The errors and fixes section covers the eleven failures people actually hit, starting with the two that account for most PDF problems: the security policy block and missing Ghostscript.

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