getting ImageMagick to work with vB (on Windows)
 

I'm running vBulletin on a windows server. I changed the Image Processing Library setting in vBulletin from GD to ImageMagick.

But now when I try to upload an avatar (as a user, under "Edit Avatar" in the User CP), I get this vBulletin Message: "Invalid File".

When I installed ImageMagick on my server, I had two different installation packages to choose from, the DLL version and the static version:

ImageMagick-6.4.7-2-Q16-windows-dll.exe
ImageMagick-6.4.7-2-Q16-windows-static.exe

I chose the DLL version (since it was the recommended one).

Is that the problem?

If it matters, the ImageMagick Binary Path I set is:
C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.4.7-Q16\

(And that is indeed the path to the program folder for ImageMagick.)

(I know that ImageMagick is working on my server because I did their test to verify.)

So in short, my question is, which version of ImageMagick should be installed (on Windows)? The DLL or the Static? Or does it matter?

Thanks

Did you set the ImageMagick path in the Admin CP?

Yes, I did set the path. That was not the problem (although, if you have spaces in your path, that could be a problem on Windows (if vB doesn't know to put quotes around it), so just to be safe, I installed ImageMagick to C:\ImageMagick\ instead of the default C:\Program Files\ImageMagick\).

The problem is described in a bulletin from Microsoft. Apparently it's a somewhat common problem with CGI (or FastCGI). (By the way you have to use CGI or FastCGI on Windows because the ISAPI module version of PHP is not stable on Windows, because it's not really thread-safe as Windows applications need to be.)

The problem is that when you're running in CGI/FastCGI, the internet user guest account (IUSR_*your_machine_name*) is denied access to the Windows system program Cmd.exe (which I guess vB needs in order to execute ImageMagick). So you have to explicitly grant read and execute permissions on Cmd.exe to the IUSR_*your_machine_name* account.

Here's the bulletin from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311481

(In case anyone else running vB on Windows runs into the same problem.)

Thanks

I tried this and couldn't get it to work with Server 2003 and IIS 6. There is another permission that needs to be added. I needed to grant the IIS_WPG (IIS Worker Process Group) read/write access to the Windows temp directory and the IUSR account needs read access to cmd.exe. Now it's working fine.