Building ImageMagick From Source

ImageMagick is a free, open-source software suite, used for editing and manipulating digital images. It includes several command-line tools and APIs that are very useful for image processing tasks (creating, editing, converting, and displaying images in 200+ formats).

The official downloads include binaries for many platforms. Annoyingly, they only offer an AppImage for Linux that runs on x86-64. Since I want to use it on a Raspberry Pi running on ARM64, that doesn’t help. Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian, so you can simply install ImageMagick from the official repos with:

sudo apt install imagemagick

However, the version you get might be older than you would like.

So how do you get the latest version on a Linux ARM64 system? Use the source, Luke!

Building ImageMagick from its source code is pretty easy. This will compile all the executables and install them on your system. (these instructions are for Debian based systems - Ubuntu, Mint, etc - but similar steps should work on any Linux distro)

First, we need to install a C compiler toolchain, VCS, and some dependency libraries:

sudo apt install build-essential git libjpeg-dev libpng-dev

Next, we can download the source code:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.git

This will get the latest code from the official repository. We are going to build the main branch in its current state (under development). If you want to build a previously released version, you should do a full clone (remove --depth 1) and checkout a specific tag.

Once we have the code, we can move to its directory and configure the build:

cd ImageMagick
./configure

Now, let’s compile the executables:

make

(this will take several minutes)

The binaries are now compiled and we can install them. This will move the files (executables and shared libraries) to the appropriate locations on your system and create the necessary links and cache:

sudo make install
sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib

That’s it! The following command should now run succesfully:

magick --version

ImageMagick is now ready to use.