You may be right, I'm no ImageMagick expert. OP seems to want a count of the occurances of subimage in the source image. The output from compare with it's -subimage-search method is the best match ofset and another image, which presents OP with another problem as this only seems to work for the first match. Also, I don't think it's output is limited to gif files, that could just be an example. I think the solutions offered by others, Image::Match with it's match method and possibly Imager::Search are more along the lines of what OP requires.