Gosh. Thanks for this imput. The first one makes a lot of ssense now; Once an image is created with the first $i -> copy, then future commands are simply instructions to the right of arrow, (I know it's not an arrow and has a special name!)as in "You've done this, now do this, and this ..."

Somewhere on the web, I read that GD mutes the colours, and are thus not as vibrant. It might have been in reference to paletted GIF images, I'm not sure

If those timings are correct,6secs, then it IS incredbly slow. It's gonna take 6 mins to process 59 images! If it takes the same sort of time on Linux server, my host (shared) may not be happy with me monopolising the CPU for that length of time! (OK, so this is a one off with this qty, and 'updates' will be in the 10 - 20 images range... but still seems slow

I also heed the logic of creating the thumb from the medium size rather than starting from scratch on the full size image again. Makes more sense

In that respect, GD seems to make more sense in terms of speed, so will give that a try. The 'quality' of medium and thumb are not too important (image preview and shop cart respectively) but people will be using the upright to print from. (I used API2::PDF to place the images in a "grid" so they can simply send the PDF to a commercial printer)