Can this seemingly simple thing be done using pure-perl? I know Perl favors text crunching rather than binary crunching.

Well there is nothing technically preventing somebody writing a pure perl program to do this. However AFAIK nobody has done. So - effectively your answer here is "no".

Do I need to hire someone to do this?

Possibly. Depending how much time you want to invest/waste you might want to poke around doing the installation yourself ;-)

Would I be better off looking at an approach using PHP, Ruby or Python?

I don't know enough about the built in functionality of PHP to comment. Both Python and Ruby give you the same sort of problems Perl would.

Am I missing something obvious?

I don't think so.

The best thing for you is to bit the bullet and work on that installation thing. You'll learn a lot by doing it. But then on the other hand:

I'm developing on a Windows machine (indigoStar.com's IndigoPerl - 5.8) but my target environment is a Unix server that gives me limited access for installing custom software and no super-user privileges.

A specific Unix server? Why not develop on that? And it's either got ImageMagick or GD or whatever, or it hasn't. So, do you know?

I'd be suprised if PHP,Ruby or Python weren't using GD or Image::Magick as well underneath the hood.

Actually they are, but maybe the modules are already available on the target server for one of these (well probably for PHP indeed), that would ease work quite a bit for the OP.

That's a good point. Though I would think most hosts would have magick or GD on it.

As anecdote, don't know wether it's still the case, but Yahoo! Store used GD from within the LISP software.

-Lee
"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

I was watching a show last night on Edison and his inventions. One of the early lessons he learned, was never build anything that won't sell. Your pure Perl version of this cropping app, will be so slow, that nobody will use it, since most people can install and use ImageMagick, GD, or Imager ( or it is preinstalled for them). If this was used in online web apps, the first thing that would happen, is you would get alot of cgi carshes due to timeouts( as your Perl script uses 12 seconds to do what the c-based module does in .3 seconds).

It will take alot more effort to make your app(bug free), than it would to learn how to install and use the existing modules. It reminds me of myself, when I was a purely functional programmer, and would spend hours trying to avoid using objects, because I didn't want to learn how they worked.

Thank you all for your replies!

I understand now that what I was missing is how slow it would be to execute such an operation using pure perl. I did understand that it would be a very large undertaking to build something like that, but not why it had not been done.

I have spent some time already on trying to install and configure the modules I mentioned. I guess I'll go back to that and make one of them work.

A specific Unix server? Why not develop on that? And it's either got ImageMagick or GD or whatever, or it hasn't. So, do you know? - Cody Pendant

Cody, I don't have access to it yet, it's for a client site so I don't have all the details yet, but that is a good point. I'll find out and figure out my resources then work on the rest of it until I have access to develop that one chunk on the Unix Server.

Thanks again, your feedback put me back on track ( of 'back to the drawing board' with what I've got ) instead of trying to find the pie in the sky.

Peace

I've not been succesful in installing Perlmagick myself, last time I tried. So, skip that. Just install ImageMagick, which is a binary install for Windows and quite easy to install on Linux (it may already be on the system, if it has PHP as well), and just use the command line tools. In my experience, that works quite well.

use GD;
$image = GD::Image->new("myimage.jpg");
($width,$height) = $image->getBounds()
$newimage = new GD::Image(100,100);
$newimage = copyResized($image,0,0, 0,0,100,100,$width,$height);
open(IMG, "new.jpg") or die "Can't open output: $!";
binmode IMG;
print IMG $newimage->jpeg;
close IMG;
[download]

Steve

What you're talking about is simple using that library:

With a bit of fiddling to correct the syntax errors, this code produces a distorted image - not a cropped image.

This version should do better (update: made more idiomatic/terse, it should really do aspect preservation to make a better image instead of translating an unknown aspect to a square)–

use strictures;
use GD;
use Path::Tiny;

GD::Image->trueColor(1);

my $original_image = GD::Image->new( shift || die "Give an image!\n" )
+;
my $new_image = GD::Image->new(100, 100);

$new_image->copyResampled( $original_image,
                           0, 0, 0, 0,
                           $new_image->getBounds,
                           $original_image->getBounds );

path("new.jpg")->spew_raw($new_image->jpeg);
[download]

The changes that make it “right” are GD::Image->trueColor(1) and $newimage->copyResampled instead of copyResized.

Alright.
I've done this a million times. I've coded thumbnailers and auto image thingie doers a bunch. It can be a pain.

Using imagemagick is not so hard.

image magick and the gd library are probably already in that box you are developing for/in/to. Do you have a shell account ? try this sh1t3:

Did it work? Muhahhahahhahah! H311 Y3ah! Ah.. open source.. waddyagonna do... let it give you a lap dance for free- she's sooo good...

So, anyway.. convert is actually imagemagick. Imagemagick has all these diff interfaces to it, perlmagick is one of them, there's stuff for C, for python, etc. Interfaces. What we used up there was a command line interface, convert is mad good, you have got to look at what it can do.. it's INSANE.. if you are doing anything with images on a linux box, don't be shooting yourself in the foot and think that this stuff is *too complex* and yadda yadda.. It's not complex. It has *options*! To let you do what you want it to do! The options make sense. (Think about it, you are letting code mess with an image, this is not your regular search and replace regex). Later on when you use something lighter you'll be wishing the options were there.

Don't be lazy, here- have some coffee- on me. Drink up. If my stupid 455 could, you can do it too!

I'm going to put a 800 line little tiny app I wrote called indexgallery, it lets you maintain an image gallery- this is not release worthy, this is just a script!, but it works, and it's cool.- but before I do let me focus on what may most interes you, the sub that makes a thumbnail with image magick:

Edit: g0n - readmore tags