How to create a montage in ImageMagick.
02 May 2021Supposing 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
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
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