For automated command-line image processing, ImageMagick is the bomb. You can convert, resize, recolor, append, stretch – there are an unbelievable number of ways to play with images. Recently, I used the +append option of convert (the main ImageMagick command line tool) to patch together a couple different gif files with transparency. Here’s the command I used:
convert +append image1.gif image2.gif image3.gif image3.gif
The ‘+’ means append the images horizontally (‘-‘ means vertically). I was appending the three images, replacing the third with the result (I thought). Well, it seemed to do the job and I moved on to placing the images with CSS to create the famed “rounded corners” image box (what I’m using for the post titles here). But things did not work as I expected. Six or seven rounded-corner CSS examples later (and I won’t admit how many days), I finally determined that the images were appended, but a lot of extra transparency was added as well, which really wreaked havoc with my CSS alignment math. Something to watch out for anyway.
