[thelist] auto-image-resizing best results

[Aredridel]

On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 18:51, Simon Willison wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> What method of automatically resizing photographs gives the best quality 
> results? This is for automatically generating both thumbnails (quality 
> not too important) and 600px wide images (very important) from high 
> resolution digital photos. I've been experimenting with GD with PHP, and 
> although the results it gives are adequate for producing thumbnails they 
> are slightly flakey for larger images - they're not bad, but they're not 
> brilliant either.
> 
> When I resize a photograph in Fireworks MX (with resample / bicubic, 
> which are the default settings) the results are stunning. Does anyone 
> know of a tool that can be run on a Unix server that produces a similar 
> quality?

Absolutely.  ImageMagick.  It's phenomenal, a host of utilities callable
by a shell/system command, and included with most linux distros.

There's also a php-imagick extension that really is nice.  I use it on
http://unicas.com/ for auto-resizing product pictures from their (huge)
originals to the sizes shown on the site.

Ari