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Update: I have updated the code below to remove the comment that was shown if the function had been disabled due to an upgrade. It caused a error in WordPress’ RSS feed if left. This hack/mod continues to work in version 2.9.2 of WordPress too.

Ok you might be thinking that I’m obsessed with ImageMagick, and who knows, maybe you’re right. However it, in my opinion, is the best image manipulation package for use on servers. It has a lot of options can composite things I never even considered & most importantly has a excellent memory management system which is great for those on low resource or shared servers.

One thing that bugged me about WordPress is that dispite how complex & how brilliant it is, it still hasn’t included any support what-so-ever for ImageMagick. I mean even phpBB & Gallery2/3 have ImageMagick support and they are open source applications. I can’t really complain though as WordPress is still the best blogging software out there & I couldn’t live without it.

Anyway I have come up with a small fix hack that will make WordPress use ImageMagick. I would only advise doing this if you have a good knowledge of coding, and I will say this only once, back-up your database & your files just in case. Nothing should go wrong, if it does you can always just restore WordPress’ original source files, but have a back-up as it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Since the auto-updater was introduced modifying WP’s core files became dangerous as any changes are overwritten when you update. There are only two ways to get round this, one is not possible in PHP without the help of a PECL package such as ‘runkit’, the other is a little more complicated, but is the best thing available as PECL packages cannot always be installed on shared servers & the like. We are going to provide an alternate function for WordPress to use for resizing images, should the original it uses be missing. The easiest place to put this function, as it won’t be affected by auto updates, is the functions.php file of your theme. The function is this:

// Re-define image_resize() function to use ImageMagick. An evil, but necessary hack.
if(!function_exists('image_resize')) {

	function image_resize( $file, $max_w, $max_h, $crop = false, $suffix = null, $dest_path = null, $jpeg_quality = 90 ) {

		$magic = 'path/to/convert'; //place full or symbolized unix file path to ImageMagick here...

		$size = @getimagesize( $file );
		if ( !$size )
			return new WP_Error('invalid_image', __('Could not read image size'), $file);
		list($orig_w, $orig_h, $orig_type) = $size;

		$dims = image_resize_dimensions($orig_w, $orig_h, $max_w, $max_h, $crop);
		if ( !$dims )
			return $dims;
		list($dst_x, $dst_y, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w, $dst_h, $src_w, $src_h) = $dims;

		// $suffix will be appended to the destination filename, just before the extension
		if ( !$suffix )
			$suffix = "{$dst_w}x{$dst_h}";

		$info = pathinfo($file);
		$dir = $info['dirname'];
		$ext = $info['extension'];
		$name = basename($file, ".{$ext}");
		if ( !is_null($dest_path) and $_dest_path = realpath($dest_path) )
			$dir = $_dest_path;
		$destfilename = "{$dir}/{$name}-{$suffix}.{$ext}";

		if ( IMAGETYPE_GIF == $orig_type ) {
			$crop = ($crop) ? "^ -gravity center -extent {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}" : "";
			exec($magic." -limit memory 50mb -limit map 128mb -size {$dst_w}x{$dst_h} '{$file}' -thumbnail {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}{$crop} '{$destfilename}'");
		} elseif ( IMAGETYPE_PNG == $orig_type ) {
			$crop = ($crop) ? "^ -gravity center -extent {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}" : "";
			exec($magic." -limit memory 50mb -limit map 128mb -size {$dst_w}x{$dst_h} '{$file}' -thumbnail {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}{$crop} '{$destfilename}'");
		} else {
			// all other formats are converted to jpg
			$destfilename = "{$dir}/{$name}-{$suffix}.jpg";
			$crop = ($crop) ? "^ -gravity center -extent {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}" : "";
			exec($magic." -limit memory 50mb -limit map 128mb -size {$dst_w}x{$dst_h} '{$file}' -thumbnail {$dst_w}x{$dst_h}{$crop} '{$destfilename}'");
		}

		// Set correct file permissions
		$stat = stat( dirname( $destfilename ));
		$perms = $stat['mode'] & 0000666; //same permissions as parent folder, strip off the executable bits
		@ chmod( $destfilename, $perms );

		return $destfilename;
	}

}
?>

Again this is a dirty hack & I claim no resonsiblity for any problems it causes it is up to you whether or not you use it.

This is basically a copy of WordPress’ image resize function, but with all the GD image creation parts taken out and the final resize & save replaced with an exec with the equivalent ImageMagick code in. You may be wondering why I left the image type if in. This is because if the image’s do not match the two types shown the destination file name gets changed to convert all others to a jpg. Conversion will be handled by ImageMagick, but the if is there so that we don’t automatically convert all image types to jpg.

As far as I am aware it doesn’t create any security flaws as all info passed to image_resize() by WordPress is normally checked by WP first. All you have to do now is comment out the image_resize() function in the wp-includes/media.php. The problem of course is that you will have to comment it out again after an upgrade, but at least you don’t have to paste in a function again or even write it again. If there was a filter, or hook to use so you could change the image_resize() function it would be easier, but I haven’t been able to find one.

I hope that helps someone. Let me know should you find any errors or should anyone find any bug/flaws & I’ll try to fix them.