Ruby graphic libraries

Question

What's the difference between RMagic, ImageMagick, GD, etc. and which one should I use? I was looking for a thumbnail generation script and noticed that every script I found uses a different library for the same thing.

Answer 1

Imagemagick, GD, DevIL, and GraphicsMagick are libraries used to create and edit image files. RMagick is a ruby wrapper around ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick. You may find other wrappers

I've had luck installing and configuring GraphicsMagick (similar to ImageMagick) and using RMagick on my Mac.

Are you doing batch processing? What about logical resizing (fixed XY, max XY, percent reduction)? Image types (png, jpg, gif, bmp)? Integration with other tools (Paperclip, as mentioned above)? What's your server setup (shared host, can install libraries, etc.)?

If you provide some more details on your thumbnail generation needs and your setup that might help give you a better answer, but I'd suggest giving at least GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick a try, along with mini_magick or rmagick. Imagescience sounds interesting to me too though...