Now available: better control over ImageMagick operations

Image Enhanced Scaling is dead – long live ImageMagick Advanced Options! Yes, the Long Module Names Movement is back with longer names than ever before!

As of Octover 10, Image module comes with a new contributed module: ImageMagick Advanced Options. This is good news for anyone who needs fine-grained control over their images in Drupal, such as photographers or managers of image archives – regardless of wheter they use Image module or not. This post describes how it came into existence and why you should use it.

Image Enhanced Scaling is a module that taps into Image module's node operations and regenerates its derivative images in a better way. The result is sharper images and better color accuracy if it's configured properly. It's been around for a while and has served me and others quite well. However the implementation has always been something of a hack which meant bad performance out of the box and being very vulnerable to changes in Image module.

Recently there was some talk in the Image issue queue about adding functionality to the ImageMagick image toolkit and drewish invited me to work on that. The result was a new hook in the toolkit which lets modules alter the command line options used when running ImageMagick. Using that, we built ImageMagick Advanced Options, a new bundled module which adds a whole list of options to the image toolkit settings page.

The advantages of this module compared to Image Enhanced Scaling is that it's more stable and it performs better. It doesn't redo Image module's image operations, but rather works with the toolkit itself to tune its settings. Another advantage is that other modules may use the same hook to add their own options without spoiling those that this module sets up.

However the perhaps biggest benefit of the new implementation is that the advanced options are used on all image operations in Drupal – not just in Image module. It doesn't actually depend on Image, so you can enable ImageMagick Advanced Options by itself if you for example use CCK image fields and Imagecache rather than Image.

I think this will be a good feature for a subset of power users while we're still using the current image toolkit solution. Whatever the new image solution will be for Drupal 7, I hope we can provide similar ways for modules to control different aspects of the image operations.

I'd like to thank drewish for working on this and for the addition of the new hook which is what makes it all possible.

Now, go download: drupal.org/project/image