[TYPO3-english] Converting images

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi Sergio,
> I usually introduce images in my articles for the tt_news extension. But
> I realized that generating the thumbnails for these images in the LIST
> plugin element is a very slow process. I saw thumbnails are saved inside
> typo3temp/pics folder.
>
> Could someone explain to me this process and why CPU gets so high when
> using the "convert" command? Is there any way to avoid this?

Resizing of images is done by either ImageMagick, Graphicsmagick or GD
library (depending on settings and whether they are installed on the
server). ImageMagick and Graphicsmagick are external programs and TYPO3
uses shell commands to let them work on images. GD is a library in PHP and
thus images must be loaded from within PHP and processed within the PHP
memory limits.

Image manipulation (resizing, resampling, sharpening, etc.) requires quite
a bit processing power mostly due to the amount of data and the complex
algorithms for compression, etc.

As you noticed, TYPO3 caches resized images to prevent this resource
hungry process from happening more than necessary.
TYPO3 is a CMS with very nice features -- such as image manipulation --
but this always comes at a price: TYPO3 needs quite a bit of resources
(CPU, memory) from the system. TANSTAAFL!

-- 
Jigal van Hemert.