Instant Picture Creator

version 0.1

Instant Picture Creator is an Image Wrapper written in PHP to produce images on demand for websites. It uses filters, so you can manipulate images in every way by adding own filters. Currently it comes with two basic filters for Resizing images (Example: thumbnails) and Manipulation image colour palette. You can combine filters (like 'Resize-square-100/Palette-grey') and it is possible to define Shortcuts (like 'greythumb').

Filtered images can be cached, so it is fast and only need some more server time at the first image request.

It doesn't need a special backend interface, you can manipulate images by a request like http://yourserver.com/picture.png?filter=thumbnail (you don't need to do it by yourself, it will be done by the first request anyway). In this way you can integrate this mechanism very easy in running websites. You can use it only for one (or more) folder (with images) or you can you use Instant Picture Creator in general for all images on your website. Of cause you also can use it in your backends to prepare thumbnails for uploaded images, etc …

Currently it supports GIF, PNG and JPEG image types.

[2007-11-22] Instant Picture Creator has a space at Google code now. That includes a issue tracker for bug reports and feature requests and a subversion repository. You can check out the latest source code with:

svn checkout http://instant-picture-creator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ instant-picture-creator

Read more news here.

1. Install (I think it needs around 5 minutes)
   1. Download the archive
   2. Unpack it
   3. Copy all files to your server's web directory
      • instantpicture.php, instantpicture.inc.php and instantpicture.conf.php have to be located in the same directory
      • you can copy the filters directory to any place on your webserver but it's recommended to use it as sub folder at the place where instantpicture.php is located
      • if you want to cache filtered images you should create a cache directory, and make it writeable for other users (0766 or 0777) because probably the instantpicture.php script will be runned as server's www-user
      • a recommended file structure may be:
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/instantpicture.php
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/instantpicture.conf.php
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/instantpicture.inc.php
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/filters/
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/filters/Palette.filter.php
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/filters/Resize.filter.php
        • [server-www-dir]/path/to/InstantPicture/cache/
   4. configure Instant Picture Creator
   5. Switch it on
2. Configuration
3. Filter
   • Filter Resize
   • Palette
   • Developing own filters

After you have installed and configurated Instant Picture correct, you can use it simply by request of picture's URL:

http://yourserver.com./path/to/pictures/name-of-image.png?filter=Filtername01-[Attribute01]-[Attribute...]/Filtername02-[Attribute..]

or after defining filter shortcuts:

http://yourserver.com./path/to/pictures/name-of-image.png?filter=shortcut01/shortcut02

and so on. For Example in your HTML code of your website it may look like that:

<img class="thumbnail" src="http://yourserver.com./path/to/pictures/image01.png?filter=thumbnail" alt="Thumbnail of Description 01"/>
<img class="fullsize" src="http://yourserver.com./path/to/pictures/image01.png" alt="Description 01"/>
<img class="thumbnail" src="http://yourserver.com./path/to/otherpictures/image02.png?filter=thumbnail" alt="Thumbnail of Description 02"/>
<img class="fullsize" src="http://yourserver.com./path/to/otherpictures/image02.png?filter=nofilter" alt="Description 02" />

That's all! It's easy, isn't it? I suggest to take some time for a good configuration.

• tar gz: InstantPicture-0-1.tar.gz (2006-11-15, ca. 9kb)
• zip: InstantPicture-0-1.zip (2006-11-15, ca. 9kb)

• I use it on my private website: http://haschek.eye48.com (german)
• Farmer's Boulevard is also hardcore enough to us it
• Zohreh Soleimani
• SWR Migrationsblog
• SWR Chinablog

Instant Picture Creator is released under LGPL.

Some ideas for further versions:

• built-in support for more image types (like TIFF, BMP, SVG)
• better cache managment with options to trash unused cache files
• make use as library in backends easier

If you have questions please join the mailing group or check the group's archive. You can add your bug reports and feature requests to our issue tracker. Thank you!