Efficient JPEG Image Resizing in PHP

What's the most efficient way to resize large images in PHP?

I'm currently using the GD function imagecopyresampled to take high resolution images, and cleanly resize them down to a size for web viewing (roughly 700 pixels wide by 700 pixels tall).

This works great on small (under 2 MB) photos and the entire resize operation takes less than a second on the server. However, the site will eventually service photographers who may be uploading images up to 10 MB in size (or images up to 5000x4000 pixels in size).

Doing this kind of resize operation with large images tends to increase the memory usage by a very large margin (larger images can spike the memory usage for the script past 80 MB). Is there any way to make this resize operation more efficient? Should I be using an alternate image library such as ImageMagick?

Right now, the resize code looks something like this

function makeThumbnail($sourcefile, $endfile, $thumbwidth, $thumbheight, $quality) {
    // Takes the sourcefile (path/to/image.jpg) and makes a thumbnail from it
    // and places it at endfile (path/to/thumb.jpg).

    // Load image and get image size.
    $img = imagecreatefromjpeg($sourcefile);
    $width = imagesx( $img );
    $height = imagesy( $img );

    if ($width > $height) {
        $newwidth = $thumbwidth;
        $divisor = $width / $thumbwidth;
        $newheight = floor( $height / $divisor);
    } else {
        $newheight = $thumbheight;
        $divisor = $height / $thumbheight;
        $newwidth = floor( $width / $divisor );
    }

    // Create a new temporary image.
    $tmpimg = imagecreatetruecolor( $newwidth, $newheight );

    // Copy and resize old image into new image.
    imagecopyresampled( $tmpimg, $img, 0, 0, 0, 0, $newwidth, $newheight, $width, $height );

    // Save thumbnail into a file.
    imagejpeg( $tmpimg, $endfile, $quality);

    // release the memory
    imagedestroy($tmpimg);
    imagedestroy($img);

People say that ImageMagick is much faster. At best just compare both libraries and measure that.

1. Prepare 1000 typical images.
2. Write two scripts -- one for GD, one for ImageMagick.
3. Run both of them a few times.
4. Compare results (total execution time, CPU and I/O usage, result image quality).

Something which the best everyone else, could not be the best for you.

Also, in my opinion, ImageMagick has much better API interface.

Here's a snippet from the php.net docs that I've used in a project and works fine:

<?
function fastimagecopyresampled (&$dst_image, $src_image, $dst_x, $dst_y, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w, $dst_h, $src_w, $src_h, $quality = 3) {
    // Plug-and-Play fastimagecopyresampled function replaces much slower imagecopyresampled.
    // Just include this function and change all "imagecopyresampled" references to "fastimagecopyresampled".
    // Typically from 30 to 60 times faster when reducing high resolution images down to thumbnail size using the default quality setting.
    // Author: Tim Eckel - Date: 09/07/07 - Version: 1.1 - Project: FreeRingers.net - Freely distributable - These comments must remain.
    //
    // Optional "quality" parameter (defaults is 3). Fractional values are allowed, for example 1.5. Must be greater than zero.
    // Between 0 and 1 = Fast, but mosaic results, closer to 0 increases the mosaic effect.
    // 1 = Up to 350 times faster. Poor results, looks very similar to imagecopyresized.
    // 2 = Up to 95 times faster.  Images appear a little sharp, some prefer this over a quality of 3.
    // 3 = Up to 60 times faster.  Will give high quality smooth results very close to imagecopyresampled, just faster.
    // 4 = Up to 25 times faster.  Almost identical to imagecopyresampled for most images.
    // 5 = No speedup. Just uses imagecopyresampled, no advantage over imagecopyresampled.

    if (empty($src_image) || empty($dst_image) || $quality <= 0) { return false; }
    if ($quality < 5 && (($dst_w * $quality) < $src_w || ($dst_h * $quality) < $src_h)) {
        $temp = imagecreatetruecolor ($dst_w * $quality + 1, $dst_h * $quality + 1);
        imagecopyresized ($temp, $src_image, 0, 0, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w * $quality + 1, $dst_h * $quality + 1, $src_w, $src_h);
        imagecopyresampled ($dst_image, $temp, $dst_x, $dst_y, 0, 0, $dst_w, $dst_h, $dst_w * $quality, $dst_h * $quality);
        imagedestroy ($temp);
    } else imagecopyresampled ($dst_image, $src_image, $dst_x, $dst_y, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w, $dst_h, $src_w, $src_h);
    return true;
}
?>

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopyresampled.php#77679

phpThumb uses ImageMagick whenever possible for speed (falling back to GD if necessary) and seems to cache pretty well to reduce the load on the server. It's pretty lightweight to try out (to resize an image, just call phpThumb.php with a GET query that includes the graphic filename and output dimensions), so you might give it a shot to see if it meets your needs.

For larger images use libjpeg to resize on image load in ImageMagick and thereby significantly reducing memory usage and improving performance, it is not possible with GD.

$im = new Imagick();
try {
  $im->pingImage($file_name);
} catch (ImagickException $e) {
  throw new Exception(_('Invalid or corrupted image file, please try uploading another image.'));
}

$width  = $im->getImageWidth();
$height = $im->getImageHeight();
if ($width > $config['width_threshold'] || $height > $config['height_threshold'])
{
  try {
/* send thumbnail parameters to Imagick so that libjpeg can resize images
 * as they are loaded instead of consuming additional resources to pass back
 * to PHP.
 */
    $fitbyWidth = ($config['width_threshold'] / $width) > ($config['height_threshold'] / $height);
    $aspectRatio = $height / $width;
    if ($fitbyWidth) {
      $im->setSize($config['width_threshold'], abs($width * $aspectRatio));
    } else {
      $im->setSize(abs($height / $aspectRatio), $config['height_threshold']);
    }
    $im->readImage($file_name);

/* Imagick::thumbnailImage(fit = true) has a bug that it does fit both dimensions
 */
//  $im->thumbnailImage($config['width_threshold'], $config['height_threshold'], true);

// workaround:
    if ($fitbyWidth) {
      $im->thumbnailImage($config['width_threshold'], 0, false);
    } else {
      $im->thumbnailImage(0, $config['height_threshold'], false);
    }

    $im->setImageFileName($thumbnail_name);
    $im->writeImage();
  }
  catch (ImagickException $e)
  {
    header('HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error');
    throw new Exception(_('An error occured reszing the image.'));
  }
}

/* cleanup Imagick
 */
$im->destroy();