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
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    DWRequest: MooTools 1.2 AJAX Listener & Message Display

    Though MooTools 1.2 is in its second beta stage, its basic syntax and theory changes have been hashed out. The JavaScript library continues to improve and become more flexible. Fellow DZone Zone Leader Boyan Kostadinov wrote a very useful article detailing how you can add a...

  • By
    CSS Counters

    Counters.  They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with;  a feature then, the butt of web jokes now.  CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...

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!