Date   : Wed, 25 May 2005 10:57:58 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Picture and thumbnail sizes

On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 10:36 +0100, Rob wrote:
> Just in case anybody else is like me and fed up with maintaining separate 
> thumbnail & image files, for our website (www.russianglass.co.uk - totally 
> OT) I ended up writing a dynamic module so the web server (apache) would so 
> it for me.

Does it cache the thumbnails on the server? Resizing a full-size image
for every thumbnail every time is a pretty expensive op! 

I've ended up coming at this from a different angle, with my web-based
gallery just being another 'view' on the existing original images I have
on local disk (which are organised, backed-up etc.). I'm using a config
file to generate each gallery once-only; the config file references
original images and dictates any ops needed to produce the final gallery
(rotations, cropping, resize etc.)

I'm doing that mainly because I didn't want to have to keep my original
images on local disk *and* a snapshot of any web content too; that
seemed a bit wasteful when it's an automatic and quick process to
regenerate the gallery from the config file and original images (and the
website server's being backed up by the ISP anyway). I suspect a lot of
people out there only take photos to put on their website though, so to
them it wouldn't matter as the web view on things is the important bit!

(Oh, plus I couldn't find a decent bit of gallery code that supported
captions, which was something I wanted)

cheers

Jules