ImageMagick, command line thumbnails and more

Part of the security camera feature of our system is to take a snapshot of motion in a zone. The snapshot is then shown on our camera control page, showing the last 10 events captured. To ease the loading of these images across the Internet, I needed to automatically generate thumbnails of the pictures. I found an image manipulation package called ImageMagick that has just what I need.

I call one of their apps, convert, from a perl script (in this case, resizing the image to 25% of its original size):

convert -sample 25%x25% image_in.jpg image_out.jpg