How to scale down an image on the server side with PHP?

Question

I have some images that are pulled from a server and $imgUrl holds the path of the image.

Right now I use <img src="<?php echo $imgUrl ?>" width="100" height="200"/> or CSS to scale down the image, but I want to do it in PHP so that I will serve already scaled images to the DOM

Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

This solution will cause the thumb to be created when it is requested for the first time. All future requests will fetch the already created thumb. It is using ImageMagick:

HTML:

<img src="script.php?img=example" />

PHP (script.php):

$width  = 140;
$height = 80;
$image  = $_GET['img'];
$ext    = 'png';

// Check if file exists
if ( ! file_exists('/path/to/the/'.$image.'.'.$ext))
{
    die('Unable to process the requested file.');
}

// Check if a thumb already exists, otherwise create a thumb
if (file_exists('/path/to/the/'.$image.'_thumb.'.$ext))
{
    $img = new imagick('/path/to/the/'.$image.'_thumb.'.$ext);
}
else
{
    $img = new imagick('/path/to/the/'.$image.'.'.$ext);
    $img->setImageFormat($ext);
    $img->scaleImage($width, 0);
    $img->cropImage($width, $height, 0, 0);
    $img->writeImage('/path/to/the/'.$image.'_thumb.'.$ext);
}

// Return as an image
header('Content-Type: image/'.$ext);
echo $img;