Forum Moderators: mack
So is there a way to use one source and still speed up the thumbnail image?
I created a php script that automatically scans a directory, and upon finding a .JPG checks to see if a thumb exists for that image yet or not. If so, it displays the thumb and puts reference to the fullsize file. If not, it creates it and then displays that newly created thumb. Using this model, you can, of course, disable writing to disk and always recreate the thumb, but that's a bit taxing (and redundant) on the server when you have any decent traffic coming to your sites.
If disk space is a concern for you, keep in mind that such a script will allow you to set your compression level and output size. Your thumbs can be as small (onscreen or filesize) as you see appropriate.
Also it will rename the thumbnail images with a prefix so when you bulk convert image.jpg could have the name ##image.jpg.
Organize your photo album in folders and then make one or more batch scripts in photoshop. (I heard Paint Shop Pro 8 also has some great batch functions now.)
On one of my sites, *all* thumbnails have a height of 90 pixels. It's just a matter of a couple of mouse clicks to make a (photoshop) action that shrinks an image down to 90 pixels height, sharpen it a little bit and increase the brightness of the middle tones. The thumbnails definitly look better than with any on-line algorithm (flames accepted :-) or the adjustment of width/height attributes on the img-tag when using the original-size images.
I am in the process of downloading Easy Thumbnail and will see how it works....
But what if I have a photo album where members can upload pictures? I am planning on doing something like that in PHP. Are there any good scripts around to create thumbnails on the server side?
g1smd, funny :) Too bad the jump links don't work anymore :(
stevemchey, welcome to Webmaster World! If you check out that script, be sure to read the next couple messages after it.
[edited by: Birdman at 10:07 pm (utc) on June 25, 2003]
You should find the easy thumbnails useful, its invaluable to me, used with a bulk rename utility such as [jimwillsher.co.uk...] you can do some wonderful things ;)
I would advise (strongly) against resizing your images in HTML - compressing them this way produces dodgy thumbnails and retains the original file size - so the page would be massive if there are a number of thumbs on the page.
I know that going through a lot of images and creating thumbnails is a chore(did this for 200 images once!) but some design software offers batch processing. This allows you to select an number of images (e.g. all portrait and same dimensions) and run a compression - so you can click enter - have a cup of tea - and it's done on your return :)
Then use PHP to do the rest.
