= MiniMagick

A ruby wrapper for ImageMagick command line.


== Why?

I was using RMagick and loving it, but it was eating up huge amounts
of memory. A simple script like this...

  Magick::read("image.jpg") do |f|
    f.write("manipulated.jpg")
  end

...would use over 100 Megs of Ram. On my local machine this wasn't a
problem, but on my hosting server the ruby apps would crash because of
their 100 Meg memory limit.


== Solution!

Using MiniMagick the ruby processes memory remains small (it spawns
ImageMagick's command line program mogrify which takes up some memory
as well, but is much smaller compared to RMagick)

MiniMagick gives you access to all the commandline options ImageMagick
has (Found here http://www.imagemagick.org/script/mogrify.php)


== Examples

Want to make a thumbnail from a file...

  image = MiniMagick::Image.from_file("input.jpg")
  image.resize "100x100"
  image.write("output.jpg")

Want to make a thumbnail from a blob...

  image = MiniMagick::Image.from_blob(blob)
  image.resize "100x100"
  image.write("output.jpg")

Need to combine several options?

  image = MiniMagick::Image.from_file("input.jpg")
  image.combine_options do |c|
    c.sample "50%"
    c.rotate "-90>"
  end
  image.write("output.jpg")

Want to manipulate an image at its source (You won't have to write it
out because the transformations are done on that file)

  image = MiniMagick::Image.new("input.jpg")
  image.resize "100x100"

Want to get some meta-information out?

  image = MiniMagick::Image.from_file("input.jpg")
  image[:width]               # will get the width (you can also use :height and :format)
  image["EXIF:BitsPerSample"] # It also can get all the EXIF tags
  image["%m:%f %wx%h"]        # Or you can use one of the many options of the format command

For more on the format command see
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#format


== Requirements

You must have ImageMagick installed.
