Manipulating Images Tutorial

[Colin]

The first draft is here:

http://www.monkeycms.com/content.php...&override=true

Any feedback would be much appreciated. I'll be putting this live soon.

[chrisjlocke]

Secondly you must ensure that this directory is writable by the web server account on your server. This usually involves running the following command via SSH or Telnet on your server:

chmod 755 /path/to/your/image/directory

I suspect most users will only have shared hosting, so won't be able to use a command-line. Might be worth adding that these settings can be set via an FTP client, such as FileZilla. As there are several directories that need this setting, it might warrant a tutorial in itself, so this can point to that. I don't mind doing that.

Depending on the image complexity and JPEG quality setting, you may find the image is still indentifiable but it will be next-to-useless for the external site.

Did you mean identifiable?

but you want to resize it while reducing filesize and preserving quality, you could add width=200 to the URL to reduce the image width to 200 pixels.

You mention 200 pixels, but the following example is 300 pixels. Consistency, man, consistency! The height example is the same. 200 in the text, but the example shows 150.

You can adjust the output quality of the processed images...

Could you just confirm in the 'quality' section what the scale is - I presume 1 (crap) to 100 (original).


In this 'tutorial', no mention was made of caching. If you're generating hundreds of thumbnails, this option is quite important - especially on shared hosting! (The poor server continually processing images! Oops!)

[Colin]

Originally Posted by chrisjlocke

I suspect most users will only have shared hosting, so won't be able to use a command-line. Might be worth adding that these settings can be set via an FTP client, such as FileZilla. As there are several directories that need this setting, it might warrant a tutorial in itself, so this can point to that. I don't mind doing that.




Did you mean identifiable?



You mention 200 pixels, but the following example is 300 pixels. Consistency, man, consistency! The height example is the same. 200 in the text, but the example shows 150.



Could you just confirm in the 'quality' section what the scale is - I presume 1 (crap) to 100 (original).


In this 'tutorial', no mention was made of caching. If you're generating hundreds of thumbnails, this option is quite important - especially on shared hosting! (The poor server continually processing images! Oops!)

Cheers Chris - will update now

Caching is now automatic for any image that is processed so I didn't mention it. I may add the option to turn it off though I guess it could fill up server space quickly.

[chrisjlocke]

you could add width=300 to the URL to reduce the image width to 200 pixels.

So would a 'width=400' reduce the width to 300?

The 'Image caching' at the end has two sets of 'Therefore' in quick succession .... but now I'm just being picky!

Looks good!

[Colin]

Doh - will do some tidying

[harvey]

I'm working on something which will have content images which could be either landscape or portrait in orientation.

Say I want the images to be displayed in a template within an area 300 pixels x 300 pixels, how can I tell the template to display the image 300 pixels high in the event of a portrait image or 300 pixels wide for a landscape image while maintaining the images original proportion?

[Colin]

Basically you want to resize the longest side to 300?

I don't think it's possible to do at the moment, but I can add it to the next release.

[harvey]

Yep, that's what I need!

If it can be done I think it would be really useful.

Any work-around you can think of in the meantime Colin?

[Colin]

Well not a workaround as such, but here's the protectedimage.php file that will be in the next release that now supports this

Just add &largestside=XXX to the image rather than the width/height parameters and it'll resize the image as you need it

[harvey]

Fantastic! Thanks so much for that Colin, much appreciated