Re-installing ImageMagick

The bane of my life during the summer was a crappy photography selling package called "PhotoReflect". We renamed it PhotoDefect, PhotoReject, whatever rhymed really (which was surprisingly more than we expected).

I will meta tag this post, because I'd like it to be picked up by Google.

PhotoReflect was an utter nightmare to use. The package on the Mac was rubbish, mucked up libraries repeatedly, required constant supervision, and a ton of other stuff that just didn't work as nicely for a package that was costing 4 figures per month to run.

Support didn't exist (which annoyed the heck out of me), the order mechanism constantly messed up, so we were processing orders by hand on a few occasions, so heaven knows how much money we lost.

And then to add insult into injury, they send you a monthly $9 membership fee!

So next year we'll be running our own package which it looks like we'll be custom building. It'll save the fees we've paid out this year (which makes our bottom line look so much better), but we do have to build a whole platform for this to work. Which will be quite good fun.

I spent many years running a hosting business, so this will be a nice internet services package we'll be building. Who knows, maybe we'll make a business out of it in a few years.

First issue is working some speed tests, which means re-installing ImageMagick on my machine. For some unknown reason it broke when libraries changed recently, and I hadn't bothered to update it all. Once that was done, ran some speed tests and instantly ruled out an old machine. If it takes my machine less than a second to process 1 image, its taking the old machine we were considering 3-4 seconds, which matches the processor speed chart showing 1400 vs 250 on the speed scales.

But a processor that is only capable of running an image in 3 seconds isn't fast enough. If I do move to 18MP next year, then it's 12 seconds run time, and an average of 4-5000 images per day just isn't going to cut it.