I have that issue that it's an overkill for just resizing images (which is what we're using it for; previously it might have had more uses, but now is reduced to this). Also, it gets patched for security often. Like, really often. Maybe more often than it feels comfortable to update.
Then, there are major incompatibilities between versions 6.9.x (which is what is even in the latest Fedora, likely other distros as well) and 7.x (which is probably what's sane to use in this day and age). Which means that to use 7.x, you're likely to have to roll your own and tuck it in its own LD_LIBRARY_PATH. That hurts.
The cherry on top in my particular case is PerlMagick. It's not installable in any way other than with the ImageMagick itself. You cannot have just Perl modules, which you "perl Makefile.PL && make && make install".
When you see separate packages for ImageMagick and PerlMagick in your distro, it means that the maintainer has compiled the whole ImageMagick, then torn it apart. A corollary to that is that PerlMagick is tied to binaries it came with real tight, and updating one means updating the other most of the time.
Then again, it's very likely that you use some other bindings to ImageMagick and my pain is not like your pain.
I agree using imagemagick to resize images is ridiculous overkill, that's using something like 0.01% of what it's capable of...
But then again we also use groupware/chat programs these days that occupy more RAM on the workstation OS than the entire amount of physical RAM in all of the BSD/Linux servers of a mid-sized ISP 18 years ago.
Isn't it super easy to resize images? I wrote a program to resize images after watching a computerphile video on the subject and it took like ten to twenty minutes to get something that seems functionally identical to "real" resizing. If you can read your image as a two dimensional array of bytes you can resize easily enough.
The power of ImageMagick is when you need to support multiple formats. Resizing BMP is easy, the hard part is supporting the various ways that data is encoded.
Then, there are major incompatibilities between versions 6.9.x (which is what is even in the latest Fedora, likely other distros as well) and 7.x (which is probably what's sane to use in this day and age). Which means that to use 7.x, you're likely to have to roll your own and tuck it in its own LD_LIBRARY_PATH. That hurts.
The cherry on top in my particular case is PerlMagick. It's not installable in any way other than with the ImageMagick itself. You cannot have just Perl modules, which you "perl Makefile.PL && make && make install".
When you see separate packages for ImageMagick and PerlMagick in your distro, it means that the maintainer has compiled the whole ImageMagick, then torn it apart. A corollary to that is that PerlMagick is tied to binaries it came with real tight, and updating one means updating the other most of the time.
Then again, it's very likely that you use some other bindings to ImageMagick and my pain is not like your pain.