service for creating thumbnails ?

Question

I'm running a dating site and generate thumbnails for uploaded profile images, i have a pretty basic algo that generates square thumbs and in about 95% of the cases the thumbs are pretty good and don't crop out the person's face. I was wondering if anybody knew of either :

1. a good (free and open source) php based package that I could use to generate even better thumbnails.

2. a service (paid or free, but must have an api that i can call) that would generate thumbs for me, ideally one that has a real 'face detection' mechanism.

thanks and regards.

Answer 1

I'd go with one:

<?php
$im = new Imagick( 'path/to/your/image.jpg' );
$im->thumbnailImage( 200, null );
header( "Content-Type: image/jpg" );
echo $im;
?>

Imagemagick is free and very cool (imho)