Question: Dynamic or Static Thumbs?

Kudose

Hello all.

I was wondering what would be the pros and cons of:

a. Creating thumbnails on the fly using a class, and displaying them, but not saving them.

b. Creating thumbnails and saving them to the server, pulling them normally.

c. Creating images by a class if they dont exsist, saving them, and showing them normally.

All I can come up with is ...

a. Could cause server bog downs if traffic is heavy.

b. Could take up alot of space, becuase I need a thumbnail, a resized, and a normal size image.

c. A mix of a and b.

Any comments or suggestions welcome. I am creating an inventory system and I need a thumbnail image, a show product image, and a full sized image.

Would it be better to just scale the original image to a normal sized image, save it, and show the other two variations by a scaling function but not saving them?

ShawnK

A) If all the users are viewing the same thumbnail(s) repeatly it is going to kill your server. (Depending on traffic like you said)

😎 If you have the time then this would be better because it wouldn't slow your server down nearly as much as A would. If you don't have the time then go with C.

C) In my opinion C is the best if you don't have the time or patience to manually create thumbnails. This is more logical because if all the users are going to view the same thumbnail then it makes more sense to create and then save the thubnail.

Say you have 40 users viewing the same thumbnail. With A your server will be slowed down almost 40 times more than if you used C. Because with C, after the first view of the thumbnail you never have to create another thumb for that image again.

Kudose

Thanks for your reply ShawnK. I agree with you.

This function from my class doesn't seem to do crap, but the function that calls this function is working fine (it just uploads the image). I dont get any error messages and everything returns a value.

It is supposed to take my newly uploaded image from another function in my class and resize it if it is too big, and re-save it.

Any help would be awesome...

function thumbnails($source, $quality){
		$this->source = $source;
		$this->quality = $quality;

	if((!$this->quality) || ($this->quality < 0)){
		$this->quality = 75;
	}

	$size = getimagesize($this->source);
	if(($size[0] >= 500) || ($size[1] >= 320)){
		$scale = 2; //50% scale
	} else {
		$scale = 1; //No scaling
	}

    $w = $size[0] / $scale; // Width divided
    $h = $size[1] / $scale; // Height divided
    $resize = imagecreatetruecolor($w, $h); // Create a blank image

    /* Check quality option. If quality is greater than 100, return error */
    if ($this->quality > 100) {
        $msg = 'The maximum quality is 100. Quality changes only affect JPEG images.';
		return $msg;
    } else {             
    	switch ($size['mime']) {
		case 'image/jpeg':
		case 'image/jpg':
		$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($this->source);
		imagecopyresampled($resize, $im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h, $size[0], $size[1]); // Resample the original JPEG
		imagejpeg($resize, '', $this->quality); // Output the new JPEG
		break;

		case 'image/png':
		$im = imagecreatefrompng($this->source);
		imagecopyresampled($resize, $im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h, $size[0], $size[1]); // Resample the original PNG
		imagepng($resize, '', $this->quality); // Output the new PNG
		break;
	}
		imagedestroy($im); 
		return true;
	}

}//end thumbnails function

ShawnK

I'm not too sure if this effects your class but in your switch statement you have this:

           switch ($size['mime']) {
            case 'image/jpeg':
            case 'image/jpg':

What are you trying to do there? because you define a case and then right after that you define another case without any code or break;

Kudose

It is the equivilant to an OR. Atleast that's what I saw on the php.net site.

Kudose

I figured it out. I wasn't saving it to a location, just outputting it.

function thumbnails($source, $quality){
		$this->source = $source;
		$this->quality = $quality;

	if((!$this->quality) || ($this->quality < 0)){
		$this->quality = 75;
	}

	$size = getimagesize($this->source);
	if(($size[0] >= 500) || ($size[1] >= 320)){
		$scale = 2; //50% scale
	} else {
		$scale = 1; //No scaling
	}

    $w = $size[0] / $scale; // Width divided
    $h = $size[1] / $scale; // Height divided
    $resize = imagecreatetruecolor($w, $h); // Create a blank image

    /* Check quality option. If quality is greater than 100, return error */
    if ($this->quality > 100) {
        $msg = 'The maximum quality is 100. Quality changes only affect JPEG images.';
		return $msg;
    } else {             
    	switch ($size['mime']) {

		case 'image/jpeg':
		$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($this->source);
		imagecopyresampled($resize, $im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h, $size[0], $size[1]); // Resample the original JPEG
		break;

		case 'image/jpg':
		$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($this->source);
		imagecopyresampled($resize, $im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h, $size[0], $size[1]); // Resample the original JPEG
		break;

		case 'image/png':
		$im = imagecreatefrompng($this->source);
		imagecopyresampled($resize, $im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h, $size[0], $size[1]); // Resample the original PNG
		break;

	}
		imagedestroy($im); 
		return true;
	}

}//end thumbnails function
}