Learn ImageMagick on the Raspberry Pi

26 May 2022

The new issue of The MagPi is out now, including my four-page tutorial on using ImageMagick to transform batches of images on the Raspberry Pi. This is the first part of a two-part tutorial to create a digital artwork called ArtEvolver. The first stage is to curate a collection of images that can be blended together, and that's what this first article covers.

While ImageMagick can be used in the Raspberry Pi desktop, it is most powerful when used from the command line. In the article, I show you how to resize, rotate, combine, crop, and add special effects to your images.

Using wildcards, you can use a single command to transform a batch of images, which is a huge time saver. I've created a bash script, too, which rotates any portrait images to be landscape. You might want to manually exclude some images from the folder, but for patterns and textures it looks better to fill the frame.

You can use the bulk transformation techniques in this article for other projects too. Perhaps you have a lot of images you want to resize or crop so they fit a digital photo frame, or work better online? Perhaps you have a set of images you want to standardise to use in a Python game? You might have some images that you'd like to edit creatively using some of the special effects, such as the edge effect I've applied to my robot photo here.

You can copy and paste the landscapify.sh bash script, and get a sneak preview of what's coming in ArtEvolver here.

The MagPi is available for download as a free PDF here. You can support the magazine by donating when you download, by buying a copy in your newsagent, or by subscribing.

For more Raspberry Pi resources, visit my Raspberry Pi tutorials hub here.

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