Resizing and cropping an image from the command line: ImageMagick, libvips or sips
For assistants asked to resize, crop or convert an image, this feature compares the three recorded command-line tools on one small synthetic picture: a 16×12 PNG with four coloured quarters. On macOS in October 2026, cropping matched pixel for pixel across ImageMagick, libvips and sips, and halving the size matched between ImageMagick and libvips, but sips's half-size result differed in 24 of 48 pixels. Each tool ran under different install conditions; this is not a quality, speed or format comparison.
Three tools, three ways to get them
- ImageMagick (
app:imagemagick) provides the magick command; headlesson tested 7.1.2-33 installed with Homebrew on 2026-10-11, an install that also upgraded other shared libraries on the test Mac. - libvips (
app:libvips) provides the vips command; headlesson tested 8.18.7 as a minimal build in an isolated directory with the optional codecs beyond PNG and PPM turned off (its own native formats remain), which is not the same as the Homebrew package. - sips (
app:sips) ships with macOS; headlesson tested sips-316 already at /usr/bin/sips, with nothing installed. - Editorial advice, not tested beyond this picture: on a Mac where nothing may be installed, sips (
app:sips) can do basic crops and conversions; where exact pixel results matter, check the output of sips (app:sips), libvips (app:libvips) or ImageMagick (app:imagemagick) on the actual images rather than assuming they agree.
Observed in the tests
- Cropping an 8×6 area from the same offset gave the same pixels with ImageMagick (
app:imagemagick), libvips (app:libvips) and sips (app:sips). - Halving the picture to 8×6 with nearest-neighbour sampling gave the same 48 pixels with ImageMagick (
app:imagemagick) (point filter) and libvips (app:libvips). sips (app:sips)'s default resize differed from that result in 24 of 48 pixels (largest channel difference 33); which method sips uses was not identified, and no tool is ranked for image quality. - sips (
app:sips) kept every pixel on a round trip from PNG to LZW-compressed TIFF and back to PNG. libvips (app:libvips) converted the PNG one way to PPM, and the PPM, read with a separate decoder, had the expected colours. - libvips (
app:libvips)'s minimal build refused to write JPEG and exited 1, because that format was turned off in the build; sips (app:sips) was tested only with PNG and TIFF. - The libvips and sips results come from 2026-10-14 runs; ImageMagick (
app:imagemagick)'s crop and resize were run on 2026-10-14 as part of the libvips comparison, and its own lesson (a gradient image and JPEG output) passed on 2026-10-11.
Cautions from the records
- sips (
app:sips): offsets for cropping and sizes for resampling are given height first, then width; without --out it may change the input file, so the test always wrote to a separate file. - ImageMagick (
app:imagemagick): in version 7 the magick command replaces convert; its default security policy allows everything unless denied, so restrict coders such as PDF and PS before handling untrusted files. - libvips (
app:libvips): each command runs as a separate process, so chained operations go through intermediate files; output format is chosen from the file name suffix.
What was not tested
The comparison of ImageMagick (app:imagemagick), libvips (app:libvips) and sips (app:sips) used one synthetic RGB picture. Photographs, colour profiles, transparency, metadata, JPEG and other formats, large images, speed and memory were not tested. headlesson_get with sections ["lesson","gotchas"] on each ID gives the exact commands, versions and failure conditions.
Records cited
Each line gives the record, its public page if there is one, and where its name comes from.
- ImageMagick —
app:imagemagick(no public page yet; available over MCP); source: https://imagemagick.org/ (checked 2026-10-11, primary, official) - libvips —
app:libvips(no public page yet; available over MCP); source: https://github.com/libvips/libvips/blob/v8.18.7/README.md (checked 2026-10-14, primary, editorial) - sips —
app:sips(no public page yet; available over MCP); source: operator-provided; not publicly verifiable (checked 2026-10-14, primary, official)
Article source
headlesson editorial judgement (checked 2026-10-14, inferred, editorial).
Retrieve over MCP
headlesson_get id="feature:images" on https://mcp.headlesson.com/mcp