NYCPHP Meetup

[Aaron Fischer]

Hey guys,

I'm writing some custom blog software and want to add some features to 
handle uploading/storing/displaying photos.  On upload from the user I 
want to use PHP to do some image manipulation.  Initially, I will 
probably just want to be taking the image(s) and creating two or three 
different sizes.  Later on I may want to perform some more complicated 
tasks on the images but not right now.  For the foreseeable future 
upload and output files will be jpg.

I have checked my server environment and it appears that it does not 
have GD or ImageMagick installed.

It seems that GD will do what I need.  Also, from some googling around 
it seems that ImageMagick is a bit more complex and would require more 
of a learning curve to get started.  Since the project needed to be 
finshed yesterday I'm thinking that GD might be preferable.

This is a request that I need to make of my server administrator.  In 
order to make a knowledgeable request I'm doing as much up front 
research as possible.  I've never administrated a server so some of this 
is new to me.

I'm reading http://us2.php.net/gd to try and get a sense of what is 
needed.  For example, it appears that for GD I would need to ask my 
server admin to recompile PHP with GD enabled?  Or is this just stuff 
that can be changed in the .ini file?

I'd appreciate any comments regarding the best way for a (slightly) 
experienced programmer to get up and running with some basic PHP image 
manipulation features.  Certainly the code that was posted just recently 
on the other thread for resizing with GD will be very helpful.

Any corrections on mistaken assumptions would be helpful as well.

Thanks very much!

-Aaron