How to get working ImageMagick on Mac with brew

by David Burgos

NOTE: Some libraries or packages use ImageMagick, check their dependencies and be aware to have them correctly installed.

This issue can break your app without an explicit error message. Hopefully this helps you to save time.

The problem

Recently I had some problems with ImageMagick on Mac.

I already had installed it but for some reason I had not linked it.

  • If have not installed it, run brew install imagemagick
  • Run brew doctor to get all the problems of your brew packages. I got:

Get working ImageMagick on Mac with brew

Ok, let’s link it.

Just run brew link imagemagick


Error: Could not symlink share/doc/ImageMagick-6 /usr/local/share/doc is not writable.

Wow, another problem!

Ok, make it writable running sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local/share

Now, run again brew link imagemagick

You should see the next succesful message 🙂