ImageMagick is a popular open-source software that allows you to manipulate digital images in almost every way and supports more than 200 image formats!!

The chances that ImageMagick has already been installed on your Ubuntu system are pretty high as many other software use it as a dependency. Verify it with:

convert -version

Yes. ImageMagick is a CLI tool and it is used as convert, not imagemagick in the terminal. That’s where a lot of users make mistake.

If you see the “convert command not found” error, you can install ImageMagick using this command in Ubuntu:

sudo apt install imagemagick

But it may not give you the latest version. Let’s see how to get ImageMagick in detail and how to install the latest version from the source code.

Install latest version of ImageMagick from the source code

First, you’d need some dependencies to download and compile ImageMagick, a development environment is required by the ImageMagick like a compiler and other required development tools, so you need to install build-essentials tools using the command given below:

sudo apt-get install -y \
  build-essential \
  libde265-dev \
  libdjvulibre-dev \
  libfftw3-dev \
  libghc-bzlib-dev \
  libgoogle-perftools-dev \
  libgraphviz-dev \
  libgs-dev \
  libheif-dev \
  libjbig-dev \
  libjemalloc-dev \
  libjpeg-dev \
  liblcms2-dev \
  liblqr-1-0-dev \
  liblzma-dev \
  libopenexr-dev \
  libopenjp2-7-dev \
  libpango1.0-dev \
  libraqm-dev \
  libraw-dev \
  librsvg2-dev \
  libtiff-dev \
  libwebp-dev \
  libwmf-dev \
  libxml2-dev \
  libzip-dev \
  libzstd-dev

The next step is to download the source files of ImageMagick from the official website of ImageMagick by typing the command provided below:

wget https://imagemagick.org/archive/ImageMagick.tar.gz

After downloading the ImageMagick source file is completed, extract it using the command given below:

tar xzvf ImageMagick.tar.gz

After the extraction of the ImageMagick package, move to the ImageMagick directory by using the “cd” command:

cd ImageMagick-7.1.0

Alright, now to perform the compilation of ImageMagick and configuration, type the command given below:

./configure \
  --with-bzlib=yes \
  --with-djvu=yes \
  --with-dps=yes \
  --with-fftw=yes \
  --with-flif=yes \
  --with-fontconfig=yes \
  --with-fpx=yes \
  --with-freetype=yes \
  --with-gslib=yes \
  --with-gvc=yes \
  --with-heic=yes \
  --with-jbig=yes \
  --with-jemalloc=yes \
  --with-jpeg=yes \
  --with-jxl=yes \
  --with-lcms=yes \
  --with-lqr=yes \
  --with-lzma=yes \
  --with-magick-plus-plus=yes \
  --with-openexr=yes \
  --with-openjp2=yes \
  --with-pango=yes \
  --with-perl=yes \
  --with-png=yes \
  --with-raqm=yes \
  --with-raw=yes \
  --with-rsvg=yes \
  --with-tcmalloc=yes \
  --with-tiff=yes \
  --with-webp=yes \
  --with-wmf=yes \
  --with-x=yes \
  --with-xml=yes \
  --with-zip=yes \
  --with-zlib=yes \
  --with-zstd=yes \
  --with-gcc-arch=native

Now, it’s time to use make the command to build what we’ve configured previously.

make

If ImageMagick configured and compiled without complaint, you are ready to install it on your system. Administrator privileges are required to install. To install, type the command given below:

sudo make install

You may need to configure the dynamic linker run-time bindings:

sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib

Finally, verify the ImageMagick install worked properly, type

/usr/local/bin/convert logo: logo.gif

So which version of ImageMagick, you’d get after going through this long process? Well, let me show you the installed version of ImageMagick after going through this process.

convert -version