Installing Imagemagick for Typo3

One of the things you immediately find out about Typo3 is that it uses Imagemagick, a server based image modification tool, to handle thumbnail creation, image resizing, and more. Imagemagick gives Typo3 some great features, but only if you have it installed correctly. Typo3 can run without Imagemagick, but you’ll likely run across a few user-ability problems, especially with image resizing and positioning.

How Do I Know if Imagemagick is Installed?

There are two good ways of seeing whether or not Imagemagick is installed on your sever. Usually, if you host your site on a larger host provider, like GoDaddy, Imagemagick will be provided. But if you are not sure, here is how to check your Imagemagick install from the server side and through Typo3.

To check if Imagemagick is installed on your Linux based server, try typing the following command into a terminal window:

convert

If Imagemagick is installed, you should see a screen of help cascade through the terminal window. If not, you’ll get an error. You can also check to see if Imagemagick is installed through Typo3’s Install module. To access the Typo3 Install module you would need to create an empty file named ENABLE_INSTALL_TOOL (there is no file extension) and put it into “typo3conf” folder. Once inside, click on “Image Processing” and scroll down to “Current Configuration”.

This section will tell you if Typo3 was able to locate an Imagemagick installation on the server. The image below is an example of the server configuration with Imagemagick.

Install Imagemagick

Installing Imagemagick on a Linux server is quite easy. It is even easier on the Windows side. I am only going to cover a Linux installation in this guide.

First, download the latest version of Imagemagick.

Second, unzip the download files.

Third, open a terminal window and navigate to the files you just unzipped. I unzipped the files to my root directory, so I navigated with a command like:

cd ImageMagick-6.5.1

Once in the Imagemagick folder, run the following commands to configure the installation, make the install, and install the files.

./configure

make

If ImageMagick configured and compiled without complaint, you are ready to install it on your system. Administrator privileges are required to install. On a recent attempt to install Imagemagick, I was missing some image libraries, so my first attempt to install Imagemagick failed. Make sure you have all the necessary libraries installed. If you don’t, you may see some errors at the end of the ‘make’ command’s output.

If you are ready to install, use the following command to get jpg and png support on the server. Sometimes, the default Imagemagick install commands don’t provide all the necessary features for Typo3. Installing Typo3 with the ‘–with-jpeg’ and ‘–with-png’ tags should fix that problem.

make install --with-jpeg --with-png

OnceTypo3 is successfully installed, you will need to restart your web server. This will ensure that Apache is looking for and using the Imagemagick extensions. You will also need to return to the Install module in Typo3 and make sure that Typo3 is seeing and using Imagemagick.

Once everything is complete, your thumbnails should be working on the backend (no more yellow question marks) and image resizing should be a breeze!

Comments

1. Joris(June 3, 2009)

   Hey Zac,

   Interesting post, very clear.

   Only problem is my host provider wouldn’t let me install IM or GM and they wouldn’t do it for me either.

   Do you know if there is an alternative so Typo can generate thumbs without IM?

   Thanks in advance.

   Gr Joris
2. Zac(June 3, 2009)

   Hi Joris,

   I don’t think there is an alternative for Typo3. You may just have to look into another host provider. GoDaddy has inexpensive options.
3. Danny(July 16, 2009)

   Awesome post. It has a lot of great information about hosting. Much appreciated!
4. Ben Lobaugh(March 10, 2010)

   Great… would have been nice if you had told me about this post when we were struggling with images last month…
5. Zac(March 10, 2010)

   You know, that would have been handy. Doh!