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How to uninstall ImageMagick on a Mac, and the libraries it brought with it

Remove ImageMagick with Homebrew, then the dozens of image libraries it pulled in that nothing else needs. brew autoremove finds them.

4 min read

How do I uninstall ImageMagick on a Mac?

brew uninstall imagemagick
brew autoremove

ImageMagick 7.1.2 was 32 MB on our Mac. It depends on libraries for every format it reads: HEIF, WebP, JPEG XL, TIFF, OpenEXR and more. brew autoremove removes the ones no remaining package needs.

Why does brew autoremove keep some libraries?

Another package still uses them. On our Mac several image libraries were shared with other tools, such as poppler, so autoremove left those. That is correct: removing them would break the other tools.

More on Homebrew's leftovers: Homebrew packages taking up space.

Common questions

How do I uninstall ImageMagick on Mac?

Run brew uninstall imagemagick, then brew autoremove to remove libraries nothing else needs.

What does brew autoremove do?

It removes packages that were installed only as dependencies and are no longer needed by anything.

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