How to Quickly and Easily Check Image Size using Linux Terminal

If you want to see how many megapixels an image has under Linux, especially in a shell script, it is usually not easy. However, I have found two solutions that make it easy to check this, just by issuing a command. I also compared them at the bottom of this article.

The first solution is exiftool

Installation: sudo apt install exiftool

Using it is simple, just substitute the path to the image in the command below:

exiftool -s -ImageSize /path/image1.png | awk '{print $3}' | awk -Fx '{print ($1 * $2) / 1000000}'

The second solution is ImageMagick

Installation: sudo apt install imagemagick

Using it is simple, just substitute the path to the image in the command below:

identify -format "%wx%h" /path/image1.png | awk -Fx '{print ($1 * $2) / 1000000}'

Speed comparsion

Conclusion

Both solutions are great for displaying how many megapixels the image is. However, if that's the only goal, I would personally choose exiftool because of the less storage space it takes up.