Image Magick Question

[RHolm]

G'day,

A colleague of mine is working on a website that uses Image Magick, he has to use thumbnails, and he asked me if it would make any difference to the download time if the thumbnail was created on-the-fly rather than made when the image is uploaded?

Thanks

Ryan

[drew010]

depending on server load at the time and initial image size/quality, it may take anywhere from a few milliseconds to seconds to generate the image before the person is presented with the download, but it wont affect the download time. if you plan on having a very large number of downloads and therefore have to resize the same images many many times, its much faster and resource friendly to make the thumbnail on upload.

[freebie]

it's definitely best to do this upon upload. Do something where it saves with the same file name plus _thumb, thus you'll have something like file1.jpg and file1_thumb.jpg. Then all you have to store in the database is file1.jpg (and you can do a string manipulation to create the thumbnail name when needed).