Dark Thumbnails on EC2 with ImageMagick / RMagick

Question

With the yum installed version of ImageMagick on the default Amazon EC2 instance I was getting dark thumbnails via rmagick.

How do I get a newer version of ImageMagick on EC2?

Answer 1

Using a combination of the ImageMagick source installation instructions and some instructions from a blog, I got the following to work:

Get rid of the old version

yum remove ImageMagick

Install the dependencies You will need the appropriate ImageMagick dependencies for whatever graphic types you expect to convert.

yum install wget tcl-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel ghostscript-devel bzip2-devel freetype-devel libtiff-devel

curl and extract the ImageMagick source

cd ~/
curl -O http://www.imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar zxvf ImageMagick.tar.gz

Test configuration

cd ImageMagick-xxx
./configure

Confirm configuration There should be a yes next to all the image types you anticipate needing to convert, if not see the dependencies step above.

Build and install

make
make install