Introduction

Some days ago, when I was going to do some image processing work, I stumbled over it. I needed to redraw an image using the data set by the user. Then I got ImageMagick. Now in ASP.NET, you will find very few articles or help for ImageMagick. Thanks to bubble2k for his excellent post on ImageMagick. But I decided to go for the command line execution of ImageMagick which is done easily in other web languages like PHP.

All the basic ImageMagick functionality that has been shown here is completely done by command line execution.

Using the Code

Using the code is very easy. But you have to download the ImageMagick DLL version for windows from ImageMagick.org. Use the following link to download ImageMagick.

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows

Download ImageMagick-6.3.7-10-Q16-windows-dll.exe from the above link. Install the setup file. Your set up has been done. Now open the project using your editor.

***[Update] You can also check ImageMagick-6.5.3-Q16-windows.zip. It's the binary version of ImageMagick. Please follow the next * marked section for imagemagick binary use.

Now here is the main matter that you should know to execute the EXE using command line:

Dim proc As New Diagnostics.Process()
proc.StartInfo.Arguments = fileargs
proc.StartInfo.FileName = Server.MapPath("MagickCMD.exe")
proc.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False
proc.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = True
proc.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = False
proc.Start()

Now the MagicCMD.exe is the key which is executed every time using command line arguments. The command line arguments are passed using "fileargs" variable. Fileargs is written like this:

"convert " & Server.MapPath(source) & " -rotate 90 " & Server.MapPath(flname)

***[Update] Imagemagick Binary is more interesting. Download the imagemagick Binary from the above link. Unzip the folder, you can see that there are *.exe files for every possible imagemagick operators [like convert, compose, montage, etc.]. So you can use those operators directly in your application. Like to resize an image, you just need to write it in the following format:

convert -resize 500x200 C:\source.jpg C:\result.jpg

Then use the path in the following format. Check that here convert.exe has been used directly by the application.

Dim proc As New Diagnostics.Process()
proc.StartInfo.Arguments = fileargs
proc.StartInfo.FileName = Server.MapPath("magick\convert.exe")
proc.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False
proc.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = True
proc.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = False
proc.Start()

The rest is the same. The command line only varies due to the various features. I have only used 12 features of imagemagick. There are many things that can be done. Visit the link below for more commands:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#depth

ImageMagick Command Line Execution in ASP.NET