What is the best way to handle allowing users to add thumbnail images to a site, both for their profile picture and also subject matter pitures available in some sort of gallery?
Is there a way to reduce the physical size and the file size of an image if the user submits a large photo.
Do I need external software that will create thumbnail images from the submitted images?
Thanks
You should enable GD Library (it might be on by default in your copy).
With this, you can format images and compress the quality. It may do you best to look for a
“PHP Thumbnail class” or “PHP Image Resize class” to make it a lot easier on you.
I would probably have a user upload an image, and you resize it (Using the class you download, and it uses GD to resize/reduce),
Then save the record to the database, but put the actual file on the hard drive. And you reference the physical image from the database record. This way your database won’t get massive.
I agree to use the GD library and to find out if your host has it switched on (most do as default) is to create a php file and up load it to your hosting directory, then run it.
phpinfo()
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Just type in your domain address and point to the file to run the command above. A list will appear with all the information for each settings. I think the GD settings is near to the bottom.
Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it. Searching I found
PHPThumb from gxdlabs
Easy PHP Thumbnail Class from freshmeat.net
phpthumb from sourceforge.net
They all look pretty good and seem to do what I want. Are you familiar with any of these or have any recommendations?