Hello everyone. This is my first post to the list, so bare with me :)
I have written an application for a client that is used in the Event
Photography business. It handles taking photographs, categorizing them,
making thumbnails of them, and allows parents(customers) to view the
photos and order them. It runs on LAMP, and it really works great.
For the past two years, we've used ImageMagick v4.2.9 to process the
thumbnails. Image quality was decent enough, but the main reason for
4.2.9 was SPEED. In my testing, 4.2.9 was quite a bit faster than the
lastest releases (in the 6.x.x series). Anyway -- the clients decided
they wanted me to do some work on the image quality, so I finally
decided to move up to ImageMagick v.6.3.4.
Right now, I call ImageMagick from a "exec" call in PHP. When I first
wrote the application, it was the quickest and easiest way for me to get
it working. Command-line ImageMagick is pretty simple.
So, with ImageMagick 6.3.4, with the sharpening and compression I'm now
using, the clients are absolutely in love with the thumbnail quality --
even though the amount of time it takes to make the thumbnails is much
longer. They've asked if anything can be done about that, but I think
I've optimized the shell script as much as possible.
Now, after that long rambling... My question is this: Would I see a big
speed improvement by using the ImageMagick extension built into PHP
(MagicWand, is it called?)? I'd hate to spend all the time recoding the
application to work with MagicWand, only to find out that I dont end up
with any performance increase -- or worse of all, a decrease.
I wasnt convinced either way, from the Googling I had done on the
subject, so I thought I would post the question to the PHP list.
A little more background here, before I go: PHP iterates through a
directory of full-sized images, directly out of the camera, and "exec"'s
a shell script "thumbcreation.sh" with the details of what ImageMagick
needs to do, and where it needs to store the new thumbnails. The script
calls convert, which creates a medium sized thumbnail (333x500), and
then from that creates a small thumbnail (80x120) from the medium.
Then, the script calls composite, where is adds a watermark to the
medium size thumbnail, and saves it in the watermarked directory.
In my initial testing, years ago, I found that ImageMagick v4.2.9 was
faster than the internal GD library... however, I havnt touched GD since
my initial testing. Perhaps GD would be faster now than IM v6.3.4(?).
Okay, I've rambled on plenty now, for my first post. I greatly
appreciate any advice anyone on the list could provide.
THANKS!!!
--Eric
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