What is the best way to upload an image, save it temporary, and let some user resize and crop it in some ajaxy interface?
Any serious librarys with PHP?
Brad is right, separate your problem into its independent pieces.
I had some luck with Imagemagick as the backend. Also see here.
For Ajaxy UI tricks, JQuery seems to be the stock advice, although I've hardly used it myself.
Rather than storing temporary, I would store it permanently and do some default resizing/cropping initially. Then, if user wants to edit the default results, there would be additional interface for this.
Users are often lazy and it is OK to have some default processing for such users.
You can upload an image and store the it (the original) in the filesystem permanently. You can then use an image manipulation library (I would recommend having a look at phpThumb) to do the resizing. As for the interface, you can use jQuery or any other user interface library of your choice (see this link). The interface would merely allow user to specify the resize/crop parameters -- phpThumb will do the rest.
For a PHP Image Transformation Library, I always found class.upload.php to be quite handy. It handles resizing/cropping/filling and other basic transformations quite well.
Related
I'm using an image resizer to output images in my website. Is it possible to use a CDN in the current situation?
The image resizer takes the file path of the image and outputs the desired image. Now even if I use a CDN, the image resizer script is hosted on my server. So every image request is going through my server. Will using a CDN benefit me in any way?
The cached object on CDNs are keyed on the request URI, so you should benefit from a CDN provided you application isn't generating any randomness in the URLs. If your image request looks like this
/resizer/200x100/thing.jpg
# ...or...
/resizer/thing.jpg?size=200x100
Then the CDN will cache it for all subsequent requests.
If your sever and script is quicker enough then I would use your server code. This means you can play around with the script if you need to add custom functions. If you have any serious problems or want much more options which a CDN may provide then switch.
Short answer: No. If your server resizes images on-the-fly, then it still serves as a bottleneck, and the benefits of the CDN are essentially lost.
Three solutions you might be comfortable with:
Have the image resizer script run once upon image upload, and create all necessary image sizes, then store everything in a logical manner on the CDN. (Reasonable solution. Downside: Very rigid, adding new image sizes requires considerable work).
Have the image resizer script run (ie: resize a single image and upload to the CDN) upon request, but only if the image does not exist on the CDN already. (You can either store a list of created images in a database or, preferably, if at all possible use the object notation default image technique) (Cool solution. Downside: Old browsers don't like the object tag, non-standard, albeit valid, code).
Switch CDNs, use a more mature CDN service that allows you to manipulate media files via API. ex: http://cloudinary.com/ (Smooth sailing solution. Downside: Not as cheap as the non-intelligent CDNs out there, but in most cases you should hardly feel it, and it will save you a ton of coding).
Hope this helps, I'd love to hear what solution you chose.
I'd like to know which up-and-crop tools you suggest to me. I tried couple of scripts like JCrop but I always get stack with some type of format like bmp. I either can't upload or I can upload but can't crop. If you use (or know) one that works well with different formats, then please just give me its name and I'll be strongly appreciated!
Well, i dont know much about JCrop but you can build it up with several tools.
I think image processing kind of works should be done on server side.
There is a good OOP Library called Imagine. It's mostly based on Python's Imaging Library which is awesome and has decent documentation. And this is its crop functions documentation.
On client side you can use some kind of image area selection tool to let the user determine desired area to crop. imgAreaSelect is good to go. Then you can send crop area to php by JQuery's post function or any other way.
It's amassing that in all this time this haven't got any other answers, I hope this helps.
Like stated in the other answer you should combine a few tools to solve each part of the problem.
To let the user select the cropping area:
If you don't like jCrop you can try Guillotine. It's very lightweight, easy to set up and allows to crop, zoom and rotate images. It has touch support and it's responsive (fluid).
Keep in mind that you can't display image types that the browser doesn't support, but you can convert them in step 3.
To upload the images:
For most cases, once you have the cropping area, with a simple file input will suffice.
Now, if you want to upload files asynchronously check out
this
for a quick and easy set up or this
for a more complex solution.
To actually crop and process the image:
Once uploaded you can crop, convert and process the images on the server, ImageMagick is a great tool for this. It's Open Source and many languages have wrappers for it.
You've tagged the question with PHP so here is a PHP wrapper for ImageMagick.
I'm looking for a multiple image uploader. I prefer to not use MySQL database and no flash.
Also if it is possible to use some javascript (jQuery maybe?) to perform some cropping and scaling.
The best in all worlds would be to have a nice jQuery plugin which perform all that.
Can you please give me your suggestions?
B.R Carl
Take look at http://www.plupload.com/ which provides fallback engines if certain plugins are not available.
Depending on the engine used, it also provides functionality for resizing images on the client side.
And Yes, it's using jquery.
I've never used it, but I know a lot of people who have been using noSWFUpload, although I'm not sure if this is being maintained anymore.
As far as jQuery for cropping is concerned, you can follow a method like here...
I am creating a social network where users upload their profile image.
This image will be used in their profile page in 150 / 150 px dimension.
In the home page i.e user Activity feed I need the same image to be in 75 / 75 px.
What would be the best practice to do this
Resize image on fly (timthumb).
Resize and Save image in the server.
While uploading a photo create required set of thumbnails and save as a [image_name]thumb[size_name].jpg or so:
uploaded: file.jpg
medium: file_thumb_150x150.jpg
small: file_thumb_75x75.jpg
Naming convention is up to you, but in a fast way you get easy access to the data you need. No need to use server to generate it on the fly or scale in a browser.
I've been working on this problem for a little while and have come across 3 main ways of doing this:
Generate thumbnail images at the point of upload as a background process.
Generate images on demand through the main application
Generate images on demand using the URL as an API
Each approach has its pros and cons.
This approach is the most restrictive, you have to know all the uses and sizes of thumbnails up front so that you can generate them immediately after upload. The main advantage is that the images can be served efficiently using a server like nginx and are just like any other static resources.
Django has a library called sorl-thumbnail which provides a template tag for generating thumbnails of all kinds as and when they are needed. It uses a fast key/value store to keep track of what thumbnails have been generated, and invalidates stale generated images automatically if it detects the source image has been changed. The template tag then returns the URL for the generated image, which can be served directly from nginx without going through a scripting layer. More flexible than 1, but you can't (for example) generate an image URL using JavaScript and expect it to exist, it has to be done by the website's backend code or templates.
Fully dynamic and flexible, you can get whatever version of the image you want just by tweaking the URL, Amazon uses this method as do all those placeholder image generation websites. Can generate URLs in JavaScript and do whatever fancy things you want. The website itself doesn't need any knowledge of the thumbnailing layer short of maybe a few helper methods to generate the URLs for you. BUT, this is obviously the most resource-intensive way of doing things and you need to make sure your architecture can handle the load. You need to use every trick in the book to invalidate caches in a timely manner, avoid unnecessary hits on the resizing script etc.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd way of doing things, I like image generation to be completely isolated from my main website functionality and I like the considerable flexibility, but you need to know what you're doing when it comes to configuring your servers to handle it.
I tell you what I do. I allways store the full size image, but renaming it ussing the db ID with leading zeros. On the first use I create the thumbnail and store it in other folder, using it in next calls.
If server space and bandwidth is an issue you should consider using an cdn.
Amazon has a good service,
I am developing a new project in CodeIgniter (CI), and would like to find a CI solution to this current issue. I've got one image, which resembles a picture frame. I would like for uploaded images to be modified to have this frame in their background.
Example:
alt text http://www.sampsonresume.com/projects/visit-creation/vc-process.jpg
The first picture is the frame. The second is the uploaded image (after resizing/cropping), and the third is the combination of both, which I would like to accomplish.
If the images are going to be shown on your own website, it would probably be easier to simply use CSS (especially if your bottom image simply gives a border...). Of course, if you want people to be downloading these files with the frame, that's a different story.
I don't think CI has a built in method in the Image Manipulation class. But, that class is simply abstracts typically-used features from one of the three major PHP image libraries (GD, ImageMagick, and NetPBM). If you know what library you are using (I normally use GD for basic things like this...), then you'll just have to use their proprietary ways of doing this stuff.
You can even make your own library or extend the Image Manipulation class to add your own special features.
Also, there may be ways to do this in Zend (not sure, I'm not going to look it up either). But, there are easy ways to include Zend components into CI if you do find something.
Good luck man!
Agreed with Kyle -- your best bet is to extend the libraries already there. Take a look at ImageMagick "composite" command.
composite -gravity center smile.gif rose: rose-over.png
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/composite.php