Image

Still-image processing with ImageMagick, exiftool, and Tesseract. Use this skill when you need to modify or inspect raster images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, TIFF, etc.).

When to use

• This skill — format conversion, geometry edits (resize/crop/rotate/flip), compression, EXIF read/strip, OCR.
• inspect — probe video/audio/image containers with ffprobe without changing files. Run first if you are unsure of dimensions or format.
• download — fetch remote media before local image processing.

Gotchas

• ImageMagick v7 — some systems expose magick instead of convert. These scripts call convert; install the imagemagick package or symlink convert → magick if needed.
• Resize without height — --width 800 with no --height preserves aspect ratio (800x geometry). Specifying both forces exact dimensions (may distort).
• Crop geometry — width x height + x + y is in pixels from the top-left. Values outside the image bounds fail or return partial crops depending on ImageMagick policy.
• Optimize outputs JPEG — optimize.py always writes JPEG at quality 85 with metadata stripped. Use convert.py for lossless PNG/WebP output.
• EXIF on PNG/WebP — read_exif.py returns whatever exiftool finds; synthetic or ffmpeg-generated images often have minimal metadata.
• OCR quality — Tesseract works best on high-contrast, deskewed text. Preprocess with convert (grayscale, threshold) for noisy scans. Use --lang for non-English (e.g. deu, fra).
• Policy restrictions — ImageMagick policy.xml may block PDF/PS reads on some Linux installs. Error mentions "not authorized".