Laravel Image thumb - php

Question

I making a web app where uploaded photos are stored in /app/storage.
To show the file I am using a route ex: showphoto/{id} (Paths are stored in DB)
public function showphoto($id){
$photo = Photo::findOrFail($id);
return $this->getFile($photo);
}
private function getFile($f){
if($f->path){
$file = storage_path($f->path.'/'.$f->origin_name);
if (File::exists($file)) {
$contents = File::get($file);
switch($f->ext) {
case "gif": $ctype="image/gif"; break;
case "png": $ctype="image/png"; break;
case "jpeg":
case "jpg": $ctype="image/jpeg"; break;
case "pdf": $ctype="application/pdf"; break;
default:
}
$response = Response::make($contents, 200);
$response->header('Content-Type', $ctype);
return $response;
}
}
}
To show image I am using
{{ HTML::image(route('showphoto', $photo->id), $photo->getName(), array('class'=>'img-thumbnail', 'width' => '100', 'height'=>'100')) }}
Question: Some file are more then 2 MB and when I have a list of them they are loading very slowly, So on the list I want to show just a Thumb of the photo.
It is possible to create a temporary thumb that will not be stored anywhere?
Or it is not a good idea to create a temporary thumb each time I load a page.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

If you have a bunch of large images that you are going to be processing in some way when a page is loaded you're probably going to have a bad time. All that extra processing is going to really slow everything down.
What you could do is create a thumbnail for an image when it is uploaded and store that somewhere. That way, you need only load your thumbnails instead of the larger images.
Alternatively, if you prefer to be able to specify the size of the thumbnail in your page another solution could be to generate your thumbnails at your specified size when the page loads. You'll need to make sure that you cache these thumbnails so you can use just load them in going forward though. If you opt for this approach the first time you load your page will probably take a while, but after that, subsequent page loads will be much quicker, since it will be using pre-created, cached images.
A great package to use with Laravel when manipulating images is Intervention Image:
http://image.intervention.io/