Get Image Dimensions from Command Line

By  on  

The command line is a gold mine if you come from the perspective of a UI lover.  Getting information from the shell instead of opening an app, finding a file or directory, etc...what a novel concept.  Opening different image files opens up different apps on my Mac and, as the kids say, "ffs" -- I just want to know the image dimensions.

Using ImageMagick you can find the dimensions of an image from command line:

# Get the size of a JPG
convert photo.jpg -print "Size: %wx%h\n" /dev/null
# Size: 600x872

# Get the size of a PSD
convert website-design.psd -print "Size: %wx%h\n" /dev/null
# Size: 990x1200

You can get the image dimensions of any image type from PNG to JPG to GIF to even PSDs.  And the resulting text is as plain as it could be.  Dimensions...here you are.

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Input Incrementer and Decrementer with MooTools

    Chris Coyier's CSS-Tricks blog is everything mine isn't. Chris' blog is rock star popular, mine is not. Chris prefers jQuery, I prefer MooTools. Chris does posts with practical solutions, I do posts about stupid video-game like effects. If I...

  • By
    CSS Sprites

    The idea of CSS sprites is pretty genius. For those of you who don't know the idea of a sprite, a sprite is basically multiple graphics compiled into one image. The advantages of using sprites are: Fewer images for the browser to download, which means...

Discussion

  1. I like to use ImageMagick’s identify command. Easy to remember and gives the size along with some other helpful info:

    identify photo.jpg
    
  2. ennkay

    but that means having ImageMagick installed.

    on a mac you have the native sips command that returns info and modifies image files.
    ex. to get all sorts of info on an image just do:

    sips -g all  /Users/your_account/image_path.mime

    more info on sips available at:
    https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sips.1.html

    • Wow, thanks for the heads up! I didn’t know about sips!

  3. Jose Miguel Pérez

    Wow! I always wonder why the command file is so unknown on the Mac?

    $ file test.psd
    test.psd: Adobe Photoshop Image, 918 x 445, RGB, 3x 8-bit channels
    

    No need to install anything! Use man file for more information. Works for every kind of files, not just images:

    $ find . -print0 | xargs -0 file
    .:                                     directory
    ./.DS_Store:                           Apple Desktop Services Store
    ./Designs:                             directory
    ./Designs/.DS_Store:                   Apple Desktop Services Store
    ./Designs/Web Structure.txt:           UTF-8 Unicode text
    ./Designs/WebContents.docx:            Microsoft Word 2007+
    ./Designs/WebContents.rar:             RAR archive data, v1d, os: Win32
    ./Designs/OCMWeb02:                    directory
    ./Designs/OCMWeb02/.DS_Store:          Apple Desktop Services Store
    ./Designs/OCMWeb02/OcmWeb07Copy.png:   PNG image data, 973 x 984, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
    ./Designs/OCMWeb02/OcmWeb10Backup.png: PNG image data, 975 x 877, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
    ./Designs/Logos - Testing 2.ai:        PDF document, version 1.5
    ./Designs/Testing Cards.ai:            PDF document, version 1.5
    [...]
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!