Okay, so for the past 4 days I have been dealing with attachment_fu’s and all of that which we love/hate it. I started building a basic photo uploader and photo gallery, but ran into some painful headaches.
I have played around with attachment_fu using Rmagick in the past, but for some strange reason I was running into all these issues. So I migrated to Image Science, but after dealing with pains on my Ruby on Rails VPS, I pushed this “problem” off and decided to continue coding and deal with server issues later.
Well today, I was tired of coding and figured its time to suck it up and deal with the pain. Well, I “sovled” the problem, but is not the perfered method for the long right. Right now I got Image Science working great on my mac mini (development machine) I have been resizing, croping, and creating thumbnails all day, but knew that I had to get it working on my VPS for it to be useful.
Well, I finally “solved” or rather changed my plan and am running Rmagick on my VPS and Image Science (for now) on my mac mini. I KNOW I have had Rmagick working great on my mac mini before, just not after this recent install. Anyway, heres some tips/tricks that have helped me with my VPS (Slicehost) and my mac mini.
Setup and Install Image Science:
SSH onto your VPS(Slicehost) running Ubuntu
Run the commands:
- sudo apt-get install imagemagick
- sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev
- sudo gem install rmagick
Bam, Change the :processor in has_attachments from :processor => ‘rmagick’ to :processor => ‘ImageScience’
and you should be good to go!
This worked for others who ARE running Image Science, but it did NOT work for me 
Anyway, maybe this will help you!
Installing Image Scinence requires FreeImage and RubyInline.
- sudo wget http://ftp.cica.es/ubuntu/ubuntu/pool/universe/f/freeimage/freeimage_3.9.3.orig.tar.gz
- sudo tar -xvf freeimage_3.9.3.orig.tar.gz
- cd freeimage-3.9.3.repacked/FreeImage
- sudo make
- sudo make install
- sudo gem install -y rubyinline
- sudo gem install -y image_science
I hope that helps some Ruby N00bies that have been pulling out their hair with attachment_fu. Please let me know what image processor you are using for your photo resizing/croping/etc.
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What’s up, John! I stumbled upon your site while futzing w/attachment_fu. I’ve also had many issues with Rmagick, but have ended up sticking with it because it does seem to work pretty well *after* you figure out the nuances. We’ve been doing a *lot* of image processing using Rmagick and GSL for the face-based search services we’re writing for (soon-to-be-launched) Mugr.com, and *have* had success… but not without a fair share of hair pulling. Keep in touch.. -Preston