UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Dynamically creating and displaying thumbnails....

Ok, here's one for you...

There are many thumbnail image creating PHP scripts out there, but all require you to save the image. I don't want that and I was wondering if anyone has tried to do this...

I would like to create a table of thumbnail images (as links to the full sized image, of course) WITHOUT saving the resized image. Meaning the script would run as a PHP page, create the images and links but not have the overhead of storing the images - they only exist in the array. I haven't been able to do this and don't know if you can do this, but basically the concept is to use the (thumb) image object, display it, then destroy it.

Any ideas?

Tom

Why do you not wish to store the thumbnails? Resizing a whole bunch of images is NOT going to be a low-load operation.

There's no real way to do this as an all-in-one operation... the HTML document that creates the page can't really embed images internally (in most browsers, anyway)...

Each image request would have to be to the thumbnail script itself, while the HTML just creates the list of images...

I wanted to be able to just upload images into directories and link PHP pages to those directories which would create thumb images and links without intervention. I didn't want to have to create 2 separate images upload 2 separate directories, nor did I want to have to run the PHP script every time I uploaded pictures in order to get the thumb images. For that matter, photoshop has a great "automation" feature that will create thumbnails that is less lossy than PHP GD.

Basically, I wanted to drag, drop, and forget about it, but as you stated, I don't think that this is possible.

Lossy?

Are you working with true colors when making your thumbnails?

Check out this (somewhat sloppy) thumbnail code that I'm using...

http://flareupload.pleh.net/quickthumb.txt

It creates true-color PNG thumbnails out of anything GD can read. Pass mkthumb the source directory (of the main image), the target directory (where thumbs are stored), the filename of the image in the source directory, and an optional flag to force recreation of the thumbnail.

Right now all the error checking bits at the bottom are commented out so that it won't kill the script when trying to thumbnail, say, a text file.

The thumbnail viewer calls this function for every large file it finds, thus creating the new thumbnails on the fly... no need to run it as a separate app.

(FlareUpload is pretty nifty, ain't it? )

Adobe uses true ~ basically just resizing the original and renaming. Haven't tried it in the script - Adobe seems easier at this point.

I've seen a few scripts similar in concept but was hoping that I could creat a truly dynamic page. I see though with a browser only parsing, unlike the JVM, I cannot hold on to images without physical files.

You can use...


...to filter non image files and avoid your errors.

Thanks for all the replies.

Tom

The problem with that code is that it blindly assumes that a file named "whatever.jpg" is an image, and that the filename only has one dot...

Rule number 1: Users are malicious
Rule number 2: If not malicious, then clueless



IMO, checking out the results of getimagesize() alone is enough to determine if a file was an image. I could probably just have the code return if the "image" has no size.