When MovableType won’t recognize ImageMagick

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Recently my web-host restored the server I use after some problems which necessitated wiping it and starting from scratch. After doing this my installation of MovableType was no longer able to create thumbnails. The thumbnail option no longer appeared in the upload dialog. When I looked at the config file, all the thumbnail options were commented out – in other words it was defaulting to use ImageMagick.

If you read the verbiage in that file carefully, which I did not, it says:

Specifies the image toolkit used to create thumbnails from uploaded images.
# By default, the ImageMagick library and Image::Magick Perl module are used;
# if your system does not have these, you can use the NetPBM tools instead
# (assuming that your system has these tools installed). Possible values for
# this setting are "ImageMagick" or "NetPBM".
#
# ImageDriver NetPBM

This means it must have the Image::Magick Perl module installed also. I never would have caught this if I hadn’t read this thread which refers to it.

“….Solution:
You need to install the ImageMagick-perl rpm. I installed this, yelled, “Thumbnail options, show thyself!” and I had instant gratification!

As I’m using apt-rpm, all I had to do was type:
apt-get install perl-ImageMagick…”

Once installed by my kindly system administrator, thumbnails worked fine again.