There are three image drivers used by movable type, namely NetPBM, GD and ImageMagick. Movable Type by the way is a perl based blogging platform on which most of its features heavily relies on the what perl module were installed on the hosting server. One of the module it is using is the Image::Magick module to manipulate user upload images. Image::Magick is also the default image driver used by movable type blogging platform.

If you manage your own server then there’s a possibility that this module isn’t installed yet. So here’s how to install it properly (i know a lot of people who owns self-managed server and is using movable type as their blogging platform of choice find it hard to get this module work. I hope this guide will make it easy for you, good luck).

Setting Up ImageMagick

1. Download the ImageMagick source from here

wget -c ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.5.5-4.tar.gz

2. When done downloading the ImageMagick tarball file, decompress it.

tar -vxzf ImageMagick-6.5.5-4.tar.gz

3. After decompressing the tarball file, go to the ImageMagick directory and run the configure script.

cd ImageMagick-6.5.5-4
./configure

4. When configure is finished, it’s time to compile the source and install the source.

make
make install

5. After the compiler is done creating the library links it’s time to tell the system where to find the ImageMagick libraries.

vi /etc/ld.so.conf

add the following line:

/usr/local/lib/sbin/ldconfig

6. Now, check that your system is able to detect the Image::Magick driver by going to the mt-check.cgi url.

http://yourdomain/cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi

This guide also install the PerlMagick which is included already the ImageMagick package. It is recommended that you install the included PerlMagick perl module to avoid compile time conflicts on the libraries.

If you choose to install PerlMagick through CPAN’s perl module repository, then make sure that ImageMagick and PerlMagick is of the same version, else you will never be able to get ImageMagick work on Movable Type.