Images

Anon

I am faced with a delima. My host will not install gd support for php. They will not let me run any programs that have to be installed outside of my home directory. I have page on my site where users can upload pictures. I need to be able to make thumbnails of these images. When a user uploads a picture I am storing the pictures along with a description and the id of an event that is stored in another table in a MySQL table. Is there a way to call a maybe a perl script or something that will convert the images to thumbnails so that I can grab them with php and throw them into the database. I have page that pulls up the pictures on a page based on the event id. I currently use the img width attribute in html to resize the images to make them appear as though they are thumbnails. This is very slow for people on dial-up connections, because the pictures are all actually the original size.

adamprall

I don't think this will help you, however I have used with great success the ImageMagick package that is installed in UNIX. I call it with some kind of "exec" command in PHP. I believe that the command line was something like this to resize the image:

<?php

$filename = "hawaiiancanoe.jpg";
$newfilename = "thumbnails/hawaiiancanoe.jpg";
$commandString = "convert $filename $newfilename --geometry 120x120";

I'm not sure if I put the parameters in the right order, but I am pretty sure that this will work for you. I like imageMagick a lot, it has so many options, since my main graphic design program of choice is Photoshop, I need something that comes close to giving me some of the features without requiring me to spend all of my time learning how to program.

If you want to see if imagemagick is already installed on your hosts computer, try typing one of the commands (like the above "convert" or "identify" or "mogrify" at the command line and see if the program complains about not having any parameters, then if you see that, you will know whether or not it exists). Also, try typing "pkg_version | more" on the command line and see if that shows you what programs are installed on the server. You don't have to use gd. You can use any unix program you like that will do the job.