[Zope] Photo product: how to recreate thumbnails with Imagemagick

[Ron Bickers]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of
> Timothy Wilson

> > Does it run faster or slower than PIL? By about how much?
>
> If I understand the product correctly, the Photo product works by
> rendering
> all the various sizes at the time you create the Photo instance.
> Therefore,
> once you've created the 'Photo' the program used to create the
> images should
> have no bearing on how fast the images appear on your Web site. In other
> words, Photo doesn't create the thumbnails on the fly.

That's correct.  Both engines are too slow for on the fly rendering in most
cases, IMO.  The engine makes a different in creation speed and image
quality, but once the images are created, there's no difference in speed.

> In my experience with 1024x768 images, the difference in speed between
> ImageMagick and PIL is unnoticeable. I've got a pretty fast
> machine though.

My development machine is a PIII 550 RedHat box, which does show a
noticeable difference between the two.  I don't remember the exact numbers,
but it was something like 4 or 5 seconds for PIL to render the default
displays on a 330k image, and nearly 20 seconds for ImageMagick.  It may
vary greatly depending on the image size and complexity.  My PIII 1GHz shows
much less of a difference in the two, but I can still tell if I count.  In
any case, I think the creation speed difference of ImageMagick is well worth
the better quality.

_______________________

Ron Bickers
Logic Etc, Inc.