Like most other open-source applications, ImageMagick can be installed and configured on many platforms.

Where to get ImageMagick
You can find many ImageMagick ftp and http download links on the Internet. But I suggest you download it from the original website, because the links in that site always lead you to the newest version of the program. Sometimes third-party websites update their links with a delay (unless they use the syndication solution for their download links).

Moreover, during the lifetime of a released version there are often some bugs and enhancements that are issued by ImageMagick users and based on these reports, the development team of ImageMagick will make any required changes and update the related link. Sometimes, in these cases other third-party websites may lose the chance to detect the updated features and resolved bugs in the current version.

 You can get the newest suitable installer from http://www.imagemagick.org/download.

What are the Installation Requirements? Any successful image processing activity in ImageMagick needs enough swap memory and RAM. The amount of required memory depends on three factors:

•    What is the action you are supposed to do?

•    How many images you are working on?

•    What is the size of the image you are working on?

As mentioned in the previous chapter, there are many actions that can be performed with ImageMagick. Some of them like resizing images need less system resources as compared to ones like working with PDF formats.

The number of images is another important factor. Working on a directory with hundreds of images is obviously different from handling a single file and needs much more memory.

The third factor is the size of the image you are working with. Bigger images need larger amount of memory. I installed and tested ImageMagick on several machines with various free resources and based on my experiments allocating 100 MB of disk space for swap memory on a computer with 128 MB of RAM will run the program without errors. Any more resources will enhance the program execution.

Installation
After getting to the program download page we will see many download links. The question is what are these links for? And which one is suitable for me?

In fact, depending on the platform, there is a specific installer. As you can see the ImageMagick installation programs are categorized into two groups:

•    Programs that install it from binaries

•    Programs that install it from source

How to Install ImageMagick from Binaries
These installers are provided in either .rpm, .tar.gz, or .exe. For setting up the program just run the executable files or uncompress the .tar.gz ones. In general, these installers set up the default features but in some cases after installation we need to define the working path of the program for the system.

How to Install from a Windows Binary Release
Installing ImageMagick on Windows with a binary installer is as straightforward as any other Windows standard program installer.

Although ImageMagick can be run on older versions of Windows, it's recommended that we use newer versions as some ImageMagick features work better with them.

For setting up the program, get the suitable binary file and double-click on it. A set of introductory dialogs will be shown consisting of a welcome message a license agreement, information about the program, setting the destination for program installation and finally choosing a name for the program folder on the Windows start menu.