You will need brew, but do not install imagemagick from brew, because the portable version that you are about to build will not be created if the brew version is present.
This page (May 2026) describes a method for building a static-linked single executable ImageMagick on Apple Silicon systems only, created by Claude Code, and based on work by Peter Jacobsen, working from an earlier method by Ercan Sormuz and available here.
To build imagemagick using Peter Jacobsen's method, download and extract this zip archive to any convenient folder.
Open a terminal, type xattr -c followed by a space (the space is essential); drag the config-static script into the terminal and press return. Repeat with the build-static script.
Make both scripts executable with the chmod +x command. (Search the web if you don't know how to do this.
Run this command to install the necessary software for building the app. You may already have some of the items installed, but it will do no harm to run the full command. You may need other items, and the script should warn you if anything is missing.
brew install cmake jpeg webp openexr little-cms2 pkg-config glib fontconfig freetype gettext libzip libraqm libheif jbigkit pango libraw libwmf djvulibre pango librsvg libtiff
Then run these commands in sequence:
./config-static
./build-static -a
This will create a unix magick executable in the output-static/bin folder.
Navigate to that folder and run this command:
sudo cp magick /usr/local/bin/magick
You will now be able to run magick from anywhere in your system
To save you a lot of trouble, here is a .dmg disk image with a notarized universal build of the May 2026 version of the unix executable and an installer script that copies it into /usr/local/bin.
The app requires macOS Sonoma or later, running on an Apple Silicon Mac.
Edward Mendelson (edward [dot] mendelson [at] columbia [dot] edu)