Thumbnailing and image resizing

[ru2esice]

My friend asked me to help him with image resizing and thumbnailing. I want to ask in general, what is the best way to do this actions? I ask here, because both of us are using PHP.

His site will do many operations in one day(and at the same time, too), so it have to be simple, not CPU loading and fast.

I don't know anything about this issue, so some thoughts will be very helpful.

I was thinking about GD, but I found ImageMagick. It seems that using exec command with ImageMagick's convert utility works well on my local(I optimized resizing command many times talking with experienced users). For the moment I didn't tried APD, so I don't know about speed of command. Moreover, I haven't tried running multiple instances at the same time.

I was wondering how sites like Flickr handle this operations. Does anybody know? Is there other way, how to do this faster?

Has anyone experienced something about this issue? Thanks for any kind of help.

[NogDog]

ru2esice wrote:

I was thinking about GD, but I found ImageMagick. It seems that using exec command with ImageMagick's convert utility works well on my local(I optimized resizing command many times talking with experienced users).

You could check to see if your host has the Imagick PECL extension installed, giving you direct access to its functionality from within PHP itself.

[ru2esice]

I know it - but is it faster than using exec? And how about performance of using imagick(or ImageMagick itself). Is there any better way to solve this issue?