GD vs ImageMagick vs Gmagick for jpg? [closed]

Question

I am in the step to abandon GD for manipulating image in my website - it is awful.

Everyone saying to use ImageMagick because they are better than GD, but what about ImageMagick vs Gmagick (Swiss Army knife of image processing)?

Zend has a pretty article here http://devzone.zend.com/article/10531 talking about them.

Before I will leave for ImageMagick are there any motivation to use gmagick instead?

(PHP 5.3+)

Edit: What's wrong with asking which is better between 2 libs? I think it's a fair question. If someone could explain the good-point of one lib over the other would help me and other people reading this question. Why close such a question??

Edit2: For everyone asking what I need to do: I think it's oblivious: users uploads images (than can be png/gif/bmp w/e) I need to convert in JPG and then store it in the database, eventually if they are too big I need to resize down them a bit.

Thanks

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, GraphicsMagick is a fork from ImageMagick 5.5.2.

As far as I can see, GMagick comes with no new features; the fork is concentrating on better performance and stability, which as @Col says you should test and compare yourself.

From a feature perspective, if a library is needed for more than just basic resizing and cropping operations, I personally would prefer ImageMagick any day because of the vast, well-documented and illustrated library of thousands of examples which work very well. GraphicsMagick does not seem to have documentation of similar quality.

It's also likely that GMagick does not have whatever new features were added to IM since version 5.5.2. It may be worth checking out the ImageMagick change logs whether you're missing out on anything you need.

On a highly subjective note, ImageMagick is definitely the more popular and well-known library, and you are likely to find more support, examples and scripts for it. Also I doubt whether the performance differences are going to really make a difference in most use cases - in my experience over the past ten years, IM is not the fastest, but also not the slowest of graphics processing libraries and perfectly suitable for most everyday uses.

Answer 2

What is it you don't like about GD? Is it the API, is it missing features or is it performance?

Perhaps you can try the graphics library imagine - it has a nice, clean OOP API and can uses GD, ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick as "backends". This way you can also test which library has the best performance, without having to change your image manipulation code.