I also find Image::Magick's error handling a pain to deal with . Like you, I thought a wrapper class to take care of error handling would be a good thing. I didn't get too far down the track before I decided that it really belongs in the core Image::Magick module. Perhaps an option like DBI's 'RaiseError' to enable the die-on-error behaviour would be a good idea. It might be worth asking the package maintainer if they'd accept a patch to do something like that.