ImageMagick with a URL

By Joel Dare - Written October 3, 2025

You can run ImageMagick with a source image from the web. Here’s an example:

magick https://joeldare.com/media/sailboat.jpg -resize 400x -strip -quality 75 sailboat.jpg

This command line:

Grabs sailboat.jpg from my website
Resizes to 400px on the widest side
Strips all metadata profiles and comments including EXIF data
Saves at 75% JPEG quality
Creates a sailboat.jpg in the current directory

Today I noticed I have five posts about ImageMagick on my blog. That got me thinking; maybe I should write a bigger piece, like a long post or a field guide full of tips. To make it useful right away, I thought I’d put a big example image online. Then I wondered, could ImageMagick load that image directly, without needing curl or anything extra? I tried it, and to my surprise, it worked perfectly.

I’m thinking I could make one main ImageMagick command that handles most of what I need, and then put together a list of quick tips for the tasks I perform on images most often.

If you’re interested in an ImageMagick Field Guide, subscribe to my mailing list. I’ll send an email when I finish the guide.

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