Fixing ImageMagick resize in Postie

I noticed that postie was doing a terrible job at resizing images.

It turns out that the default GD library isn’t super good at resizing – it does a simple subsample and the result is quite jaggy (see the GD version of this image in this post)

I think the version above looks a lot better. It should have been as easy as just turning on the “use ImageMagick” function in the postie config, but it wasn’t that simple. Two files were not where they were expected to be. The easy one is “convert” which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/convert, but under BSD is actually at /usr/local/bin/convert. This isn’t a big deal as there’s a config option to point postie in the right direction. A bit harder is ImageMagick identify which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/identify, but for which there is no config entry.

The fix for BSD is to edit around line 1768 of postie-functions.php and change /usr/bin/identify to /usr/local/bin/identify before the first run or by resetting postie to defaults. If you’ve already installed postie and don’t want to reset the defaults you may need to edit the postie config database (I did) using, for example, PHPMyAdmin and set the value of IMAGEMAGICK_IDENTIFY to /usr/local/bin/identify.

And thus one gets nice, pretty postie thumbnails.