Need advice for image editing

[deodev]

Hi,

I was just wondering what the best way to do this would be:

I have several pages that displays our current inventory with pictures of item. What I need to do is put "SOLD" on the images for the ones that have been marked as sold in the database (MySQL). These images are all jpgs, and are used in different parts of the website so I don't want permantly change them.

I've read that I could dynamically place a watermark on the image, would this be the best way? would it slow down the page load?

The images are all the same size as well.

[dalecosp]

Not the 'load' strictly speaking, from the surfer's POV, but if you have a lot of traffic you might be putting the server under more strain. I assume you'd be using imagecreatefromjpeg() or something like it, so a bit more processing would have to be done before the images are sent. If you've a good server and a fairly low trafficked site, I imagine that'd be great. If you're the webmaster at E-bay, I suggest some testing first 🙂

[Mordecai]

Try looking at imagettftext. There are some cool things you can do with this, as well. I suggest checking out my image script for a couple other cool things you can use when overlaying text.

ImageTTFText overlays text by using a true type format font file.
The examples with my script will show you how to use this function.