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
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Translate Content with the Google Translate API and JavaScript

    Note:  For this tutorial, I'm using version1 of the Google Translate API.  A newer REST-based version is available. In an ideal world, all websites would have a feature that allowed the user to translate a website into their native language (or even more ideally, translation would be...

  • By
    Geolocation API

    One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...

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!