Running ImageMagick on XAMPP 1.8.3 with Windows 7

Question

I have been trying for hours to get ImageMagick working on my localhost (running XAMPP 1.8.3 on Windows 7). I have checked and tried literally every solution that I can find

Answer 1

Imagick is a PECL extension and the official windows.php.net site has compiled versions of PECL extensions.

Please download Imagick from: http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/releases/imagick/

And download ImageMagick from: http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/deps/

Please note, downloading Imagick from one site, and downloading ImageMagick from another site is likely to not work! This is because when Imagick is compiled it uses several settings that vary based on what versions of ImageMagick it is being compiled against.

FYI the maintainer of the Imagick extension recommends not running it inside Apache, but instead to run it as a background task through something like SupervisorD or cron. This is both for security and performance reasons.