Imagemagick how to apply gravity and extent to only short images - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a web page where I list images that should be 600px by 600px (width & height). So I resize all big images to 600x600 using imagemagick, which works fine.
However, some images, when I resize them (in order to keep their aspect ratio), get resized to a size smaller than 600px in height (for example 600x450). So I tried to fill the needed height by using imagemagick options (gravity, background, and extent) like so :
image.combine_options do |img|
img.crop('1200x1200+0+0')
img.resize '600x600'
img.background 'white'
img.extent '600x600'
img.gravity 'center'
end
That gave me what I want for these kind of images (short images). However, this effect of centering is applied to the other images (bigger ones) as well ! Is there any way to prevent that ?
Update:
Just to show you what I mean, I made up this example... if I don't add extent and gravity the image will start from the top left corner
but if I add extent and gravity (center) the image will start from the center, something like this :
I want only images that result on resized images smaller than 600x600 to be centered, but in the example as you see even an image that get resized to exact 600x600 get centered !! that's not what I want
the solution :
I end up using shell command using system function in ruby
system "convert #{image.path} -crop 1024x1024+0+0 -resize 600x600 -background white -gravity center -extent 600x600 output.png"
and that worked fine! I don't know why minimagick wasn't working correctly, but I just get rid of that gem from my gemfile which is fine too.

Answer 1

Here is your command in command line Imagemagick with proper resetting of the virtual canvas after the crop.
convert image -crop 1200x1200+0+0 +repage -resize 600x600 -background white -gravity center -extent 600x600 result
Here are two results with slightly different resize arguments. It looks like your commands are using the equivalent of the ^ flag set on the resize argument.
Input:
Proper result without the ^ flag: (Note padded with white)
convert wiki.png -crop 1200x1200+0+0 +repage -resize 600x600 -background white -gravity center -extent 600x600 result1.png
Result with the ^ flag: (Note cropped)
convert wiki.png -crop 1200x1200+0+0 +repage -resize 600x600^ -background white -gravity center -extent 600x600 result2.png
The above is Unix syntax. For Windows double the ^ to ^^, since ^ is an escape character in Windows.
Perhaps your issue is with minimagick and not Imagemagick. You can check by testing my command line.