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Create Image Thumbnails with ImageMagick

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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!

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Discussion

  1. Gilles Crettenand

    There is a -thumbnail option to create, you’ve guessed it, thumbnails : http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#thumbnail

  2. Cory LaViska

    And if you need to do it on the fly, here’s a chainable wrapper for GD (PHP): https://github.com/claviska/SimpleImage

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