Benchmarking Netpbm, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and GD (libgd)
Last updated on 14-Sep-2004
I wanted to know which toolkit to use to generate the thumbnails and resizes
in my Gallery.
The choices
- netpbm 10.20 - requires lots of pipes and usually takes long but
is said to generate the best results
- ImageMagick 4.2.9 - this is like the "good old" release of
ImageMagick which every expert recommends because its fast and of good
quality
- ImageMagick 5.4.2 - I haven't had the time to compile the
latest IM5, so this is what comes with SuSE 8.0
- ImageMagick 6.0.7 - the latest release of ImageMagick at this
time.
- GraphicsMagick 1.0.5 - a package that branched off ImageMagick
and is now developed independently, aiming more stability. We are already
at version 1.1.3, I will test it soon.
- gd 2.0.28 - I developed the gd2 module for Gallery2, so this
is an interesting test. Although my tests are done in Perl using the "GD"
module, I believe it shouldn't be very different than what the gd-extension
to PHP does.
The tests
I tried to find the most "optimized" commands to run to generate thumbnails
(150px and 250px large) and resizes (640px and 800px large). The difference
between a thumbnail and resize at the moment is purely whether it is good to
keep EXIF/ICC/other-data from the source image (resize) or if those could be
thrown away (thumbnails). Not all toolkits are able to retain the profile
in resizes, or I haven't yet included code to do that explicitly.
As input I took two random images taken with two different digital cameras.
Other different input image types to improve quality of the tests are
welcome.
The results
A summary with just the numbers. Or if you
want to see the resulting images, check out the following pages:
