Generating thumbnails

[Anon]

I did a search on this subject, and found some useful coding to make thumbnails on the fly. When I asked my server administrator, he told me not to use the code as it takes alot of server resources to run it. Is this true? What would be the best/easiest way to generate thumbnails? I have over 1600 photos, and I am getting tired of making thumbs manually with a photo editing program. Suggustions? Thanks everyone!

[[deleted]]

"Is this true?"

To a degree. It is a fair bit of work, and if you do it on the fly you are just wasting resources, because the outcome will be the same every time.

"What would be the best/easiest way to generate thumbnails"

There are special image viewing utilities like ACDSee that can generate thumbnails in batch-mode, just point to a directory and away you go.

As for add new images, you can create a PHP script that generates the thumbnail semi-on-the-fly so that it is created once and written to disk with all the others.

[Anon]

The easiest way would be to create them and save them on the server? Same as I am currently doing. Generating them on the fly is what takes so much resources?

[[deleted]]

Correct.

Generate them once and save them.
It's ok to let PHP generate them once, but making PHP generate them again every time you want to display them makes no sense at all.