Al: Thanks, sorry for messaging this to the list. Can you point me in
the direction of the official phpList forum?
Thanks a ton,
--Eric
Al wrote:
You'd be far better off asking your questions on the phpList forum.
There are a number of hints on the forum for speeding up things. Plus,
look in the examples section.
Eric Holt (PHP List) wrote:
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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