What is the nest PHP thumbnailer/resizer class that preferably works on most shared hosts?
Clarification: I'm looking for a PHP class/wrapper (eg. phpThumb(), Asido), so I don't have to run GD or ImageMagick functions directly. I'm specifically looking for resizing and framing functions.
GD is supported on many hosts http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/book.image.php
I guess the best two (and by far the most common) are either GD or ImageMagick. I've had a lot of joy with the second.
Imagick is a native PHP extension to create and modify images using the ImageMagick API. It is used on many shared hosts:
Imagemagick is good, and has two APIs for PHP:
I've found that both ImageMagick and GD are too slow for creating un-cacheable dynamic images on the fly if you have more than one request per second. I had to serve dozens of requests per second, and found that I could get around 50 times speed improvement by writing the routine as FastCGI with C & jpeglib.
I have good experiences with both phpThumb and Wideimage. Wideimage is the more modern PHP5 approach while phpThumb has much more features.
I use Greg_Photo as an accessor to the underlying GD commands. For pretty basic resizing it works great.
Asido works great with some modifications ;) It supports most features that I need (resizing, framing), has drivers for both GD and Imagemagick, nice simple API, and organized codebase.
ImageMagick will definitely produce really sharp images, but it's not easy to install or manage. ImageMagick itself needs to be installed on the server, and then a compatinble version of MagickWand needs to be installed.
I've also found that it has a habit of creating massive temporary files of up to a GB or more and then dumping them into your /tmp directory, which you need to be careful of. It will also eat up a massive amount of memory unpredictably.
For these reasons, I would not recommend ImageMagick if you are on a shared host.
Here's a great script with great documentation. http://phpthumb.gxdlabs.com/