In one of our larger projects, the CMS (Content Management System) has been designed to manage thousands of images and graphics and relate them to textual content. However, the design company has come up with a grid layout approach that requires all images to conform to several sizes to fit into the grid.

So far, we have employed someone to take every image and resize it to all possible image sizes that could be used. This process is lengthy and never ending as we continue to add more and more content.

So we were extremely happy when we found this PHP tool from the folks at Shifting Pixel:

Smart Image Resizer (PHP): a simple way to create thumbnails and more on the fly — Shifting Pixel

This tool is a powerful way to resize and crop any image on a website without actually modifying the actual image or tweaking code. Images are uploaded once at a high resolution and then they can be reused in any format just by adjusting a query string. When you have hundreds or thousands of images, this is a big time saver.

The Smart Image Resizer works with images in several formats such as JPEGs, GIFs, and PNG files. It can sharpen each image and crop them based on height/width ratios, color fill transparent GIFs and PNGs and features built-in caching to keep image variations for the sake of performance.

The web site has installation instructions, minimum requirements and a license to use the script. They have also posted some examples of how the script renders and resizes images in a couple of different scenarios. We hope you find it as useful as we did.