How to create a montage in ImageMagick.

image-magick montage

Supposing you want to see a whole directory of images, resized and smooshed together into one image. (Having a crash? New section.)

This is easily done in ImageMagick via the montage command:

montage my-awesome-dir/*.jpg montage.jpg

montage output

Figure 1. The output of montage for my directory of twitter card images for this website.

To add a filename label underneath each thumbnail image, add a -label flag,

montage -label '%f' my-awesome-dir/*.jpg montage-label.jpg

montage output

Figure 2. The montage with labels.

Here are the modern docs as well as the legacy ones; to be honest, I have an easier time finding what I need with the legacy docs.

When it crashes, and customization details.

Dmytro Mishkin mentioned that montage will crash if your image directory has images that are too large … and yes, it will. Quick ideas, links, and workarounds:

First, montage will resize images according to the -geometry setting, the default

is ‘120x120>+4+3’ which means to fit any image given into a box 120x120 pixel in size.

So if the images in your directory are very large, resize them. Here’s a command-line workaround: copy the directory, resize with mogrify, and then montage.

cp my-awesome-dir -r my-awesome-dir-small
mogrify -resize 10% my-awesome-dir-small/*.jpg
montage my-awesome-dir-small/*.JPG montage.jpg

© Amy Tabb 2018 - 2023. All rights reserved. The contents of this site reflect my personal perspectives and not those of any other entity.