How to display an image created by imagick php in html view? - php

Question

I am using phalcon php framework. I have a blog in my application where a user can submit an image attached to his blog post, and it is displayed when viewing the post. I want to display this image on the index page of the blog where each post is listed, however, i want it to be a thumbnail to reduce its size. I was able to use imagick to save a thumbnail at a directory and load the thumbnail from there, however, i need to avoid saving the thumbnail and generate the thumbnails every time just to display them.
Here is the code I used to create the image with imagick
public function thumbnail($img)
{
$maxsize = 100;
$image = new Imagick($img);
// Resizes to whichever is larger, width or height
if($image->getImageHeight() <= $image->getImageWidth())
{
$image->resizeImage($maxsize,0,Imagick::FILTER_LANCZOS,1);
}
else
{
$image->resizeImage(0,$maxsize,Imagick::FILTER_LANCZOS,1);
}
// Set to use jpeg compression
$image->setImageCompression(Imagick::COMPRESSION_JPEG);
// Set compression level (1 lowest quality, 100 highest quality)
$image->setImageCompressionQuality(75);
// Strip out unneeded meta data
$image->stripImage();
// Writes resultant image to output directory
$image->writeImage($uploaddir.'/thumbs/'. basename($_FILES['photo']['name']));
// Destroys Imagick object, freeing allocated resources in the process
$image->destroy();
}
I tried just to remove the last two lines where the image is saved and then the imagick object is destroyed, but couldn't go on to display the image in the index view.

Answer 1

Step 1 - Use the buffer.
Step 2 - Unlink the already saved image after you get its base64 code.
For example consider the following code snippet:
$im = new Imagick();
$im->setResolution(300,300);
$im->readimage('path_to_the_file.pdf');
$im->setImageFormat('jpeg');
$im->writeImages('file_name_to_save.jpg', false);
$im->clear();
$im->destroy();
$dest = imagecreatefromjpeg ('file_name_to_save.jpg');
//Step 1
ob_start();
imagejpeg($dest);
$image_data = ob_get_clean();
imagedestroy($dest);
$img_source = base64_encode($image_data);
//Step 2
unlink('file_name_to_save.jpg');
Now in the $img_source variable you have the base64 of the image that you can use it like this:
'<img src="data:image/jpg;base64,'.$img_source.'" style="max-width: 100%; max-height:100%;" />';

Answer 2

I'm using something similar to this:
public function thumbAction() {
// Generate thumb from image & save it on disk
$image = $this->thumbnail(); // well can be anything that return Imagick
$this->response->setHeader('Content-Type', 'image/jpg');
echo $image;
}
Anyway in above example you don't need to save the image but only echo created thumb to the user.
Also I'm storing an image on some path like thumbs/a/image.jpg. I've configured nginx to check for existing file and if file does not exists it calls Phalcon script.
In Phalcon app I have a route that points to any /thumbs* path to above action. On first call the image is saved on the path thumbs/a/ so on the next call Nginx server returns that image instead of calling PHP.