On PHPMaster.com there's a recent tutorial from Martin Psinas about how you can add text to an image with the help of Imagick, the image editing software that's available to PHP via an extension.

In a previous article, Timothy Boronczyk wrote about how to create watermarks with Imagick using an overlay image. In this article, I'll show you how to achieve a similar effect using plain text.

He takes a sample image (a headshot) and offers two versions of the same functionality - both the shell command (using "convert") and the PHP code that sets up the font to use, adds placement and pushes the result back out as a PNG. He also includes two other types of overlay - a font mask for a more see-through look and a tiled version, overlaying the text all over the image.

In this recent post to his blog Bob Majdak looks at how to use the Imagick functionality to create images with transparent backgrounds.

So we have this image, and we want to set it to be 75% transparent using Imagick. This sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Perhaps we are trying to create a watermark, or we just want to fade the image for some reason.

He shows how to use the ImagickPixelIterator to take care of some of the issues that can be caused by just a call to "setImageOpacity". A code sample is included in the post showing how to take a source image and make it transparent without ending up with a white border/black background like the other version.

James Morris has a quick tutorial today showing how to pull the exif data from a photo and make it into something useful you can either display on on the site or store for categorization.

Today I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to strip exif data from an image using Imagick. The first port of call was the (pathetic) documentation at php.net. I searched for 'exif' but found nothing. [...] I was tipped off by a colleague to the method Imagick::stripImage() which apparently did what I wanted. The only mention of exif is in a rather helpful comment at the bottom of the page.

This comment pointed him to the Imagick::stripImage() function that pulls off the data and returns exif information (or, as the documentation calls it, "profiles and comments"). His seven line script is included in the post that initializes the Imagick object, pulls in the file and runs the stripImage() method with the option for "exif:*". The resulting properties are then displayed including aperature value, date taken, exposure time, make and model of the camera, shutter speed, resolution and much more.

If you've been using (or will be using) the uuid and imagick extensions for PHP, you might be able to save yourself a lot of headache by reading this new post from Lars Strojny about his segfault woes.

Ran into a bug yesterday, where http://pecl.php.net/uuid in combination with http://pecl.php.net/imagick yielded a segfault when using uuid_create().

After trying to trace it down with a backtrace and cachegrind results, he (and Mikko & Pierre) found that both extensions were built against the libuuid.so.1 file. While that wasn't the issue directly, they did find a work-around that helped the issue - renaming some ini files so uuid was loaded first.

Jeremy Cook has put together a guide for installing Imagick on Windows so it can be used in your PHP applications..

After a few weeks of experimenting on and off I've just managed to get the Imagick extension installed under Apache on Windows (my development environment). While discovering how to make it work was not at all simple the final process of getting all the pieces to play together nicely was pretty easy. In this post I'll briefly discuss what ImageMagick and the Imagick extension for PHP are, why you might want to use them, how I got them up and running and finally a very simple piece of example code. I'm hoping this post will help people avoid the frustration and effort I went through to get them to work!

He explains what the tools (ImageMagick & Imagick) are and why it's a bit more difficult to install them on Windows than just a point and click sort of thing. He walks you through an eight-step process that will have you up and working in no time and includes a simple PHP script you can run to ensure things are working as they should.

Mikko Koppanen has a quick post about the latest Windows binary releases of two graphics packages for use with PHP 5.3 - Imagick and Gmagick.

The new Windows build page http://valokuva.org/magick/ contains builds for both Imagick and Gmagick. All builds are done using VC9 and PHP 5.3. ImageMagick builds are QuantumDepth 16 (default). GraphicsMagick builds are QuantumDepth 8 (default).

You can find these latest builds on the Windows PHP.net site along with the latest PHP 5.3 builds.

Vito Chin has announced the release of a new image manipulation extension that was ported from Imagick - Gmagick.

The extension seeks to make the image processing capability of GraphicsMagick accessible from PHP. GraphicsMagick is forked from version 5.5.2 of ImageMagick and had since developed with important differences and improvements. [...] In terms of Gmagick and Imagick, we try to keep the method interface similar so existing Imagick users will find converting to Gmagick a breeze.

You can grab the extension from its PECL page.

On php|architect's C7Y community site Scott MacVicar has posted a new comparison of two of the main graphics platforms available to PHP - the GD and Imagick extensions.

If you want user interaction on your website then you probably accept the upload of some media, including images. Within PHP there are two different libraries available that provide functionality for handling images, GD and the Imagick extension. This article takes a brief look at each of these libraries.

Since GD comes bundled with PHP these days, he gives a brief installation tutorial for the Imagick extension. After that he compares the two with code for three different bits of functionality - identifying image types, working with EXIF data and modifying a current image (change format/resize).

Mikko Koppanen has a quick post today showing how to use PHP and Imagick to create an image of text filled with another image layer behind it:

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).