Global Moxie

Question

I've installed the Image::Magick module for Perl on my server, so why doesn't Big Medium offer to auto-size my images.

Answer

There are two main libraries that need to be installed to make ImageMagick work properly with Perl programs: the ImageMagick library and the Image::Magick Perl module (a.k.a. "PerlMagick).

If Big Medium does not display an option to auto-size your images when you're loading or editing an image, that means that Perl encountered an error when it requested the Image::Magick Perl module, or could not find it. This could be caused by one of several issues:

• The Image::Magick Perl module is not yet installed.
• The Image::Magick Perl module is not the same version number as the ImageMagick library on your server.
• The main ImageMagick library is not properly installed.
• Your server is missing one or more additional libraries required by ImageMagick or PerlMagick to make things go.

One thing to check is that the version of the PerlMagick distribution corresponds to the ImageMagick distribution (e.g. PerlMagick 6.2.2 for ImageMagick 6.2.2).

If the versions appear to be in order but you're still having trouble, this typically indicates that the ImageMagick utility and/or the Image::Magick Perl module is incorrectly/incompletely installed. ImageMagick is rather complicated and has many dependencies, and even if you're getting some of its functions to work from the command line, it's possible that you do not yet have all of the necessary libraries installed.

To try to determine the precise problem, try uploading the following script to your server's cgi directory, setting its permissions to chmod 755 and running it from the browser:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
print "Content-type:text/plain\n\n";
eval { require Image::Magick };
print ($@ || 'Loaded OK');
exit;

If the script reports "Loaded OK," then all is well with the Image::Magick module. But you'll probably instead get some kind of error message that may help you to troubleshoot the problem with your ImageMagick installation.

For more help with ImageMagick, please consult the ImageMagick site: http://www.imagemagick.org/