What is the difference between the two image toolkits?

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

A few differences that I have heard about:

GD2 comes with PHP, so it is almost always available, while imagemagic is a separate utility program which must have been installed on the server.

Some say that imagemagic offers better quality, others say not so much better to be worth the trouble.

Imagemagic takes up more memory but being a separate program it is not limited by PHP's settings, so it is less likely to have resource issues.

sparkguitar05’s picture

I have both GD2 and Imagemagick set up on my shared hosting server. Which one do you recommend I use?

cog.rusty’s picture

I tend to choose imagemagick without having any particularly good reasons.

I have seen some claims like http://drupal.org/node/29528 (look at the example link and hover over the thumbnails to see what they are). Myself, I can't see any differences, I just take their word.

========= Edited to add:

One other thing to consider is versions. For example if you have PHP 5.2 you know that you have a recent version of GD2 while you still need to check the version of imagemagick yourself. It could be ancient.

green monkey’s picture

@cog.rusty

Thank you for this post.

I was having random problems with IM and was considering my options. I was so deep into it - I forgot all about checking the age of program. I chekced - my host is running 2.2.x and ciurrent version is 2.4.x. I thinking there are major differences in the versions.

Using PHP 2.5.x I flipped over to GD2 instead or IM

Being on a private shared server - memory was an issue

Things actaully seem to running faster and smooth.

Now, if I need to allocate more memory. All I have to worrry about is giving Php more memory and not both of them

MakeOnlineShop’s picture

Hello,

I wanted to improve IMAGECACHE quality (for Ubercart shop):
http://groups.drupal.org/node/12521

I tried Imagemagick but I can't see any difference between GD2 and ImageMagick so maybe I did something wrong ?

Do you think that GD2 is actually enough ?

Thanks.