Re: Thumbnail Contribution Summary

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[quote="winstanley_john"]I've found the following contributions that go some way towards doing this,( Others dont create the thumbnail automatically.)

[url=http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,260]PHP image resampler[/url]

[url=http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,841]Automatic Thumbnail Creator[/url] (David Radford)

[url=http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1114/page,2]Dynamic Mo Pics[/url] (Joshua Dechant)

[url=http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1122/page,3]PHP image resample[/url] (Gnidhal)

Has anyone used any of the above? 

Automatic thumbnail creater looks good but only works for jpg and png
I've had difficulty with the last one because it's in French, could anyone translate? 

I really do think that this is a feaure that has to go into the core of a future Oscommerce release. Rather than a contribution because the display of images is so important - using the resized origional images doesnt work well with a lot of images.[/quote]

These are still server side solutions.  Most small ecommerce sites operate on shared servers, where safe mode is enabled.

I took a look at "imageResampler".  The one thing that caught my attention was the comment:

"//always use true color here, or you'll get some real bad color shifts"

This is not good.  In fact, in some cases you might end up with thumbnails with filesizes larger than the originals.  (He also said it was his first PHP piece of code.)

This adds another positive point to the client side method.  That is...  you will probably want to adjust your "image quality" factor iteratively.  You might also want to look at gif output as well as jpg to see which gives the best quality & the smallest file size.  I wouldn't want to upload an image & download the compressed image iteratively.  Of course you could download a few different gifs at different bit depths & 10 different jpg qualities & then choose which among those you like best so that you only have one iteration.  Given that they are only thumbnails, they should download very quickly.  It also has the advantage that your client wouldn't have to run any binaries.  But, what do you do if the server is running in safe mode?  I guess you could ask your host to install the needed libraries or you could find one who does support them.  My host (dreamhost) does have ImageMajic & I could use it for _my_ solution.  But what about everyone else?

I take it you don't like my client side solution?  Do you run Windows?

BTW, here are a couple of coments regarding the other packages:

Automatic Thumbnail Creator -- no instructions/code for changing the forms & form processing -- or database changes or using the thumbnails.  But could be used however a coder want to use it.

Dynamic Mo Pics -- a lot of work in the right direction.  I'd want to start with this and make some enhancements to default.php as well as product_info.php.

PHP image resample -- I translated the french readme with:

http://babel.altavista.com/

It was difficult to read still, but what I could understand didn't seem to make this choice any better that one of the others.