From: "Ausum" <augusto@artlover.com>
However, because without the use of caching the rendering of a simple thumbnail page may become a real pain, (the thumbnails will always regenerate from the original images, over a over again every time the page is loaded), it would be really helpful that you provide a how-to/readme on the subject of the use of RAMCache along with your product.
I will as soon as I figure out how that stuff works!!! I put in code, looking at the tiny bit of examples on the cache API, but I can't find any other doc or anything explaining how this stuff works, so I'm a little stuck myself. Without the RAMCache set up, the thumbs will be regenerated for every different client - but I did set up the headers so that each client's browser will cache the thumbs locally.
On the other hand I'd like to point out that PIL - although it's a familiar Python native library to work with- has serious lacks of image quality after resampling. The jaggy look of thumbnails is unpleasant for a professional site. Why is that? I've tested the three available methods (nearest, bilinear and bicubic), with a large-size image (2000 X 1500 or so) finding that at a thumbnail level all the samples looked the same. And bicubic is the best known (and costly) resample method. A search at the Image-sig archives also reveals the problem, apparently leading to the use of GIMP with a Python interface -instead of PIL-, when quality becomes a concern.
Actually, looking at PIL's doc's - the thumbnail command (which I'm using) calls the 'draft' command which doesn't have any interpolation. Possibly by using different commands in PIL you can get interpolation.