ImageMagick vs GD - which is faster, less resource intensive and produces better images?

php image-processing imagemagick gd
TK123 picture TK123 · Nov 30, 2011 · Viewed 40.3k times · Source

I need to choose between either ImageMagick or GD library for the following image manipulation tasks:

  • resizing images into multiple sizes
  • watermarking images

As you can see I don't need anything fancy. I'm sure both these tools can achieve them, so if one has more extra features than the other, I don't really care about.

My main concern is performance and quality. Which of these 2 tools consumes less resources, is faster and produces better quality images?

P.S. I need to use it with their respective PHP APIs.

Answer

simshaun picture simshaun · Nov 30, 2011

I would lean towards ImageMagick as far as image quality goes. It seems to produce considerably sharper/higher-quality images than GD2 (at the expense of larger filesize.)

ImageMagick is also not bound by PHP's memory limit.

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