code in the ruins

I've gotten a great response from my initial release of the Batch image uploader. So let me first say thanks to everyone who left their comments and suggestions.

Today I'm releasing the next version of the plugin - Batch image uploader 0.2. The killer feature this time around is the ability to use different "backends" to resize the images. (This was initially suggested by Alexander Radsby.) There are three supported backends right now: GD, mogrify, and imagick.

GD is PHP's default image processing library. It's fast, but the quality of the images is not so good. This is what version 0.1 of the plugin used, and it's still an option in version 0.2.

mogrify has nothing to do with me, other than being the program from which I chose my Internet identity many years ago. It's actually one of the programs in the ImageMagick distribution of command-line image processing tools. This backend offers far better image quality, but is most likely slower, than GD. To use this, you have to have ImageMagick installed, and you have to tell my plugin where to find the mogrify binary. On UNIX systems, this is nearly always /usr/bin/mogrify, so that's the default.

Finally, imagick is the imagick PECL extension for PHP. It has the same image quality as the mogrify program, but is likely to be a great deal faster. This is because it uses ImageMagick libraries instead of invoking a program, so there is none of the overhead involved with starting another shell process.

You can force the plugin to use any one of these backends, but I recommend using the 'Auto' option. This will automatically select the best available backend, in this order: imagick, mogrify, GD. You can figure out which one it's using if you enable the debugging info.

With ImageMagick support comes support for dozens of image formats. The GD backend still only supports PNG, JPG, or GIF images.

The download and other current information is at the Batch image uploader page.