If one were to create a site where users could upload images in various formats (JPG, PDF, etc.) and process that image into one monochrome GIF copy and a PDF, what would be the best infrastructure for doing so?
I know that there is already a question about image processing infrastructure, but I would like to know what specific method would be recommended for PHP.
Should I script a PHP background job? Should I store the list of images to process in a database? Should the processing of the images take place in the uploading PHP script?
Thanks in advance for any help.
It's pretty easy to call an ImageMagick binary to do things to an image. And modern servers are more than fast enough to do it as part of the post-upload processing before returning the success page to the end-user. I work on a commercial site that does exactly that for user uploads and we've never had a problem.