Imagine a scenario where you have an online photo album and the layout calls for drop shadows to be placed behind each image. It would be a hassle to manually add the shadow to each image... and actually modifying the original picture might not be possible depending on the circumstance. But if there're a few extra processor cycles available on the server, why not script the shadow using PHP?
So far in Webmonkey, you've seen how PHP can be used for databasing and site navigation. It's pretty bland. In this article we're going to leave that dry stuff behind and concentrate on PHP's image-creation abilities.
Depending upon how it's done, displaying a page of thumbnail images can be very cumbersome. Allowing the browser to resize images requires the client browser to download the entire, full-size image, then clumsily resize the image to a specified size. This causes the page to load very slowly and creates unavoidable distortion in the resulting images. The other option is to make separate thumbnail images for each individual image. This is fine if you only plan to display a few images, but becomes unrealistic on a large scale or a site involving dynamic images. Fortunately there are ways around these problems using the GD library in PHP.
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