Should I install Imagmagick over gd

Question

I'm starting to work on a project that will require a lot of image manipulation. I remember getting the impression in the past that imagemagick was somehow better than GD.

Since I have GD only, this will require me to install imagemagick, and I want to make sure it's worth the trouble. Can someone clarify if it's true that imagemagick is a better choice than GD, and how exactly is it better? Does it have more tutorials and code, or is it faster, or is more powerful, what exactly and why should I use it? What is it that most people use now?

Answer 1

Imagemagick is pretty flexible and is a whole swiss army knife of graphical translations. That said it isn't as well integrated into PHP. It's quite a lot harder to install its PHP extension for example.

The only reason I would install it is if I really wanted to do something that wasn't available in GD. Other than that, I would not guess that it is any faster or anything.