A friend has a simple WordPress-based website that I set up for him a few year ago - and he likes to post a lot of images. For various reasons I have it hosted on my VPS in Australia, which only comes with 15GB of bandwidth, most likely because I got a crazy good deal on it. The problem is, that isn’t much bandwidth. Each page of his site was previously using almost 10MB of bandwidth per view - which meant the 15GB was running out. I deduced the high usage in Firebug and noticed it was gasp from large images, some almost 1MB large. The images on the server are contained in subdirectories under a gallery folder - and I wanted to resize them. What I actually wanted to do was:

For one of my webapp projects I’m needing to layer two images. This isn’t a problem on my laptop – I just fire up GIMP, do some copy ’n pasting, and I’m done. However, since everything needs to be automated (scripted), and on a server – well, you get the point. The great ImageMagick toolkit comes to the rescue. This is highly documented elsewhere, so I’m going to be brief.