Ideas for resizing Images..

loothi has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am stuck writing a small upload script that has to run on a Solaris 7 box with limited libraries. I have to make thumbnails of the uploaded jpeg's or gif's, preferably without installing more libraries. I have found GD.pm V 1.18 which can handle the gif's but what should I use for the jpegs? The people that run the servers aren't keen on something so huge as Image::Magick (which was what I have used before) so can anyone think of a minimalistic library I could install just to make thumbnails?

Hope someone has an idea or two as I'm not making much progress here.
:-)
cheers
--l.

Comment on Ideas for resizing Images..

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Re: Ideas for resizing Images.. by Beatnik (Parson) on Jun 18, 2001 at 17:01 UTC
GD 1.18 has been outdated since uhm forever :) GIF support hasn't been in there since 1.6. GD does JPeGs as well as PNGs (that includes v1.18 - PNGs added in 1.6.1 IIRC). I recommend using a shell call to a small app, since compiling Image::Magick can get tricky. Using the LZW algorithm without permission is illegal (but who am I to send out the dogs), consult the Image::Magick manuals if you indeed wish to build THAT. Consult the manpages/docs of the application if you intend to use a shell call. Short answer:I doubt there is an easy way of doing that. Greetz Beatnik ... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.	[reply]
Re: Ideas for resizing Images.. by btrott (Parson) on Jun 18, 2001 at 19:40 UTC
One thing you could do is try to get a more recent version of GD, which handles PNG and JPEG. I realize that recent versions do not support GIF, but that's okay, because you can just convert all of your GIF images to PNG. :) If that doesn't really appeal to you, you could use the NETPBM tools to convert and resize, etc. merlyn has a column on using NETPBM tools to create thumbnails, which may be what you need. If the NETPBM tools aren't already installed on your machine, you can get them from ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/netpbm-1mar1994.p1.tar.gz (per the link in merlyn's article).	[reply]
Re: Ideas for resizing Images.. by suaveant (Parson) on Jun 18, 2001 at 18:05 UTC
I would have to say that your best bet is ImageMagick, if you can get them to install it, do. It is an excellent package for this kind of thing. Anything else you may have to code from a library like Imlib... which isn't much better than ImageMagick on space or ease of compiling. GD would probably work... but as was said... no gif support, if you want gif support... - Ant	[reply]