Increasing your memory limit as described elsewhere in this thread fixes the immediate problem. If you are manipulating large volumes of images, you may also consider spawning external programs such as ImageMagick or its slightly more stable and perfor…

See the following link:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread116143.html

And here’s my solution (I uninstalled IM and reinstalled it into my home directory, that’s why the paths are different from what I listed before. But this has nothing to do with what the problem was. I also changed the user from www to www2 – I added the www2 user and made a change in the httpd.conf file – but again this was part of troubleshooting and had nothing to do with the problem):

Code:
putenv(“MAGICK_HOME=” .$_ENV["MAGICK_HOME"]. “/Users/shafique/ImageMagick-6.4.5/”);
exec(‘echo $MAGICK_HOME’,$array);
putenv(“PATH=” .$_ENV["PATH"]. “/Users/shafique/ImageMagick-6.4.5/bin”);
exec(‘echo $PATH’,$array);
putenv(“DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=” .$_ENV["DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"]. “/Users/shafique/ImageMagick-6.4.5/lib”);
exec(‘echo $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH’,$array);
echo “”.print_r($array).”";
exec(‘/Users/shafique/ImageMagick-6.4.5/bin/convert /Users/www2/IMG_0041.JPG /Users/www2/41.png 2>&1′, $array);

So the problem was that my environment variables would not stay set they way that I had set them after installing IM; I have to set them each time I run the php code, as above. Note that simply using:

Code:
exec( ‘export $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=”/Users/shafique/ImageMagick-6.4.5/lib” ‘,$array);

(as per the IM installation instructions) will NOT work; the environment variable will NOT stay set this way (at least on my Leopard 10.5 MacBook Pro). Note also it necessary that both the input and output files be in a directory that is accessible to all (I did chmod a+rw /Users/www2).

I hope this helps others!

Thanks for the suggestion about the access rights. The PHP user operates as “_www”. Changing permissions recursively on the IM directory to give all users rwx permissions, which I did, should have taken care of any permissions issues. I ran some tests using php script to see what kind of errors were being returned, and here’s what I came up with:

Here’s the testing code:

$array=array();
echo “”;
exec(“/Applications/ImageMagick-6.4.4/bin/convert IMG_0041.JPG 41.png 2>&1″, $array);
echo “”.print_r($array).”";
echo “”;

and here’s the error that the above script generated:

Array
(
[0] => dyld: Library not loaded: /ImageMagick-6.4.4/lib/libMagickCore.1.dylib
[1] => Referenced from: /Applications/ImageMagick-6.4.4/bin/convert
[2] => Reason: image not found
)

What’s odd is that running the following command from the command line in a terminal window:

/Applications/ImageMagick-6.4.4/bin/convert IMG_0041.JPG 41.png 2>&1

works just fine. I’m thinking to focus on the first error:

[0] => dyld: Library not loaded: /ImageMagick-6.4.4/lib/libMagickCore.1.dylib

It seems that as a terminal user the library loads, but as “_www” it does not. Since the permissions are fine, maybe the paths need to be changed for the “_www” Are path settings different for different users? Your thoughts?

First the path was wrong, and the system command gave me a return value of 127. Then I fixed the path to the convert command (/Applications/ImageMagick-6.4.4/bin/convert), and I fixed the paths to the input and output filenames. Here is the code I’m using:

<?php
$resizefile = “/Applications/ImageMagick-6.4.4/bin/convert /Users/shafiquejamal/outsideofwebdir/uploads/IMG_0041.JPG /Users/shafiquejamal/outsideofwebdir/uploads/41.png”;

echo $resizefile;
$last_line = system($resizefile , $retval);

// Printing additional info
echo ‘

Last line of the output: ‘ . $last_line . ‘
Return value: ‘ . $retval;
?>

The return value is 5, when I execute this; it does not convert the file. BUT When I copy and past the resize command exactly (without quotes) into the terminal window, it works just fine – it converts the file. It just doesn’t work from php (i.e. the php script executed from the brower does not do anything). I’m running MAC OS X Leopard 10.5.5 on a MacBook Pro (Intel), and using ImageMagick-6.4.4 I’ve changed permissions on the source and target folders using chmod a+rw {paths}, and checked that everyone can read and write to those directories.