ImageMagick is very useful image processing kit. It has been used by many web servers to speed-up image processing and bandwidth optimization. If you are running Drupal or Gallery2 you can improve the performance of your web site. If your site is hosted by web host provider probably your only need to enable Drupal or Gallery2 to use ImageMagick. If your web site is running on your own server, you might need to install ImageMagick yourself.

CentOS4/RHEL provides binary package to install ImageMagick, but it is old version. You can download the latest version from ImageMagick directly, but if you try to compile it your self on CentOS following instructions from the ImageMagick's web site will end up with corrupted binary. The problem is that needed libraries are not installed. After some search on the web I found knowledge article on NDCHost web site that help me compile and install the latest version of ImageMagick.

Here is a step-by-step howto on installing ImageMagick on most Redhat Based Servers (Redhat, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc).

1. Log into your server as root via ssh or console
2. Ensure that the RPM versions of ImageMagick are installed.
   On RHEL: `up2date install ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel`
   On Centos: `yum install ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel`
   On Fedora: `yum install ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel`
   (This step will install all required libraries.)
3. type `mkdir /home/imins`
4. type `cd /home/imins`
5. type `wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz`
6. type `tar -zxvf ImageMagick.tar.gz`
7. type `cd ImageMagick*` or `cd ImageMagick-X.X.X` (replace X.X.X with the version)
8. type `./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared=yes`
9. type `make && make install`

ImageMagick website

Install ImageMagick from the source: quick guide / advanced guide

The original NDCHost article