Well one of the many issues I do work through is the need to create thumbnails for dynamic sites. If someone has defined standard design elements for fonts, colors, and image sizes you can apply them across the pages of the site.

There are times though you have an image that when displayed at full size is good for a single page view. However you may want the image at different sizes in the site. For example a column list of images may have a thumbnail width of about 150 pixels. But a vertical list of the same images at 75 pixels. Due to the situation of two thumbnails for the same image, having to code it and work out the different sizes that may be needed now or in the future can be a bit problematic.

Also if you are able to dynamically change the thumbnail size but you do not have the old images at the proper size makes changing the site more work than you may want to do. Especially if you have thousands of images to re-thumbnail. I have found that PHPThumb helps to handle these situations in a elegant way.

It creates the thumbnails on the fly. It has a cache of previously created thumbnails for quick access. PHPThumb is actually a php script. Once installed on the server. You then call that script instead of an image directly. A normal image tag is the following:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="" />

A PHPThumb image is as follow:

<img src="phpThumb.php?src=image.jpg&amp;w=100" alt="" />

You can pass PHPThumb many different query string parameters for different effects, sizes, and image processing.

PHPThumb uses the GD Image Library. This library is a common one for PHP installs. It also has some advanced features.

I have found this utility as a very useful utility for thumbnail processing. It is easy to use. The response times are fair on initial load of the images and then you don’t notice it after that. If you are after professional quality images and presentation this tool works well but it does not always produce the best quality images. This is not PhotoShop and don’t expect perfection but the quality and flexibility it gives is great for any site.