Create Image Thumbnails with ImageMagick
ImageMagick is, for lack of better term, magic. You can throw just about anything at it and succeed. With that in mind, I was recently using Google Page Speed to see how I could improve my website and it occurred to me I wasn't generating thumbnails for my post lists -- I was simply scaling down preview images with CSS. Certainly not the most efficient technique you've ever heard of. ImageMagick to the rescue -- now I can parse for images and generate thumbnails to make my site much faster to download!
ImageMagick is loaded with options but the syntax to generate a thumbnails is dead easy:
convert billboard.png -trim -resize 32x32 thumbnail.png
Instead of simply scaling down an image with CSS, I should be generating a thumbnail and serving that up instead. And since it's so easy to do so, there's really no reason not to!
There is a
-thumbnailoption to create, you’ve guessed it, thumbnails : http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#thumbnailAnd if you need to do it on the fly, here’s a chainable wrapper for GD (PHP): https://github.com/claviska/SimpleImage