PHP has a mostly undocumented part, php5-imagick. It is available in Ubuntu from Hardy, so I thought, I could woth to take a look into. The introduction says, that “Imagick is a native php extension to create and modify images using the ImageMagick API”.

I started working with PHP a long time ago, so I started image manipulation with GD because this was the easiest native way. But as the times changed, I needed to use a lot of additional scripts like unsharp_mask for better resizing, PEL to keep exif data, and so on. This was sloooooow.

Imagick extension is a lot different. First, it works on the opened image – no need for a second copy, for example on resizing. Second, it always keeps meta information by default.

I looked into some comparison and some tutorial, and I found that even imagick is a littlebit slower, for image manupilation this tool is a lot more useful, than GD.