Hello all. Can anyone recommend the best versions of ImageMagick and Ghostscript to use with Omeka Classic 2.6.1? I’m having the issue where Omeka won’t generate thumbnails for PDFs. I can use the convert command on PDFs from the command line but nothing is created when uploading through Omeka. My IT department seems to think it’s a version compatibility problem.
Thanks!
What versions do you have? We have minimums but mostly peoples’ installs are much newer than those.
There’s one particular problem people can have lately where the versions of everything are fine, but there’s a “policy” file that specifically disallows ImageMagick from reading PDFs. That might be something to check into.
The simplest thing for someone with access to the server to try is, just use the command line and try to identify some PDF file, or convert it to a JPEG or something. If it’s not working there should be some error output from ImageMagick indicating the issue.
I’m using the most current releases for both: IM 7.0.8 and Ghostscript 9.27. I can use convert on the command line to convert PDF pages to JPEGs but it’s not working when uploading files on Omeka. I checked the policy file and made sure PDF was enabled and still nothing.
I’m also having the same problems with mp4s and mp3s - ffmpeg is installed and I can edit files on the command line but Omeka won’t create derivatives. The PDF problem is more pressing for me though, so that’s what I’m focusing on first.
Are you getting no thumbnails, that is, the “blank page” icon is showing, or are you getting blank or white thumbnails? Those are two different types of problems people sometimes have.
I’m assuming it’s the “blank page” icon that you’re getting. It’s possible to have things set up in a way where the PATH variable isn’t set and so ImageMagick could have trouble calling other programs… maybe this is what’s at issue for your server? Was the “auto-detect” able to work for the ImageMagick path or did you have to fill it in manually?
Yeah, I’m getting the “blank page” icon. By auto-detect, are you talking about the default ImageMagick directory path under Settings? It’s /usr/local/bin, which I think is the default.
I mean, sometimes Omeka can detect that path and pre-fill it: this uses the $PATH environment variable set by the server. On some servers $PATH (which controls where to look for programs when running them by name alone, instead of their full path) doesn’t get set or exported to PHP, or gets set differently. One symptom of this users can see with Omeka is that we become unable to “guess” the path to ImageMagick and an administrator must fill in the path manually.
Having issues with $PATH could explain your issue of things working on the command line but not on the server: ImageMagick runs commands like gs and ffmpeg that rely on $PATH being set.
Oh, I see. I’ll check the ‘$PATH’ variable and see if that helps. Thank you very much for your help!