The custom image-resize script created for Mimbo Pro is now available as an open-source project! It’s already being used by a handful of other theme designers and I look forward to seeing what other folks do with it.
Background
The script was scoped out by me and originally written by Tim McDaniels as a way to achieve the core functionality of phpthumb while using half the code. Ben Gillbanks then added PNG and GIF support, plus improved speed and caching.
Ben now handles TimThumb’s development and has written a series of great articles and additional documentation.
How do I use it?
Simply copy the source code into a new document called ‘timthumb.php’, place it in a folder on your site (ex: /scripts/) and call the image like this:
Some important things to note:
- TimThumb requires the GD library, which is available on any host sever with PHP 4.3+ installed.
- Once installed and in-use, TimThumb will automatically create a /cache/ subfolder with proper write-permissions. If your host server doesn’t allow this by default, be sure to manually change the /cache/ folder permissions to 777.
- In addition, make sure the folder which contains TimThumb is set to 777.
- As in the example, use absolute paths for your script and images
TimThumb allows the following parameters:
- w: width
- h: height
- zc: zoom crop (0 or 1)
- q: quality (default is 75 and max is 100)
Support
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1:37 am
Thanks for releasing this! I shall give this a try soon. Seems pretty great.
3:11 am
This does indeed look very handy. I think I already have a use for it :)
One feature I’d like (it might already do this, I haven’t tried) is to just specify, say, a width, and have the script take care of maintaining the aspect ratio. So if I had an image that was 200px wide and 100px high, and all I used in the url was w=100, the image would automatically be scaled to 100px by 50px.
3:50 am
Scratch that: I’ve just tested this on a 290 x 236 pixel image. I used w=145 in the TimThumb url, and the resulting image had a height of 118 pixels.
Good stuff!
Thanks for sharing this Darren.
1:58 pm
Very handy. Thanks for sharing this.
8:08 pm
Thanks for releasing this Darren. I’ve been using a similar script i wrote myself, which was customised for WordPress, but tim thumb seems far more complete (I was relying on files that had already passed through WordPress, thus having WordPress generated thumbnails! Pretty horrible).
Thanks again.
1:13 am
really super code to crop the image in different size. great work thank a lot. i think it’s more useful code for all of php programmers. once again i thank u lot
6:54 am
Cool, as always, and the timing couldn’t be better. I just realized that it seems that WP 2.5 doesn’t create thumbnail images, it just resizes an image if you say you want a thumbnail. That is a problem with a theme that I’m using, so this may solve the problem.
11:44 pm
Nice! I was just modifying the Unstandard theme, wishing there was an auto thumbnail generation script – and here it is. I just built it in and it works fine! About the advanced caching checks I could put in the htaccess though, can I just use those without it interfering with my Wordpress setup?
11:54 pm
The htaccess stuff shouldn’t interfere with other WP issues. I’ve got it written into a couple htaccess files on my sites and haven’t noticed any weirdness.
10:20 am
Is this wonderful script working with JS libraries like Lightbox ( or a derivative ) and if not, how hard would it be to incorporate this for an absolute PHP noob ?
Could you please demonstrate how & where to hardlink the Lightbox code in your PHP source ?
Being able to display nice & easy thumbnails is all good & well, but if the originals are not easily accessible for display, why bother with them in the first place …
11:16 am
@Peter: if you’ve already used Lightbox, etc, you can use it in the same way, just construct the image URL in the way I demonstrated above (”/images/whatever.jpg&h=150&w=150&zc=1″)
12:50 pm
Thank you for your prompt & helpful response !
I realise this is not a WP plugin, but it now looks like a very neat solution to the WP 2.5 thumbnail scaling issue, mentioned here earlier. I find that almost all of the existing WP plugins for image handling badly suffer from the prevalent tendency of ‘featuritis’. I don’t need a Photoshop-cum-FTP-cum-Ajax slideshow plugin to give me a decent thumbnail in a post …
TimThumb may well fit my need perfectly, so thank you for making it available !
3:01 am
Great script. Though, Id rather use my batch resizer as much as possible and avoids GD if I can. But the script would come in handy one time I guess :) Thanks
5:52 pm
Just a quick suggestion about using mod_rewrite to improve the path reference to a resized image, sometning similat to this -
http://mrphp.com.au/node/1805
6:38 pm
Great script!
Adding support for resizing remote images would make it even better.. :)
3:38 am
Very nice idea, I could really use something like this.
Three unfortunate things I’d love to see “fixed”:
1. Unfortunately it enlarges images smaller then the h x w size bounding, instead of leaving them in their original size.
2. Unfortunately it doesn’t maintain the original correct aspect ratios images. Stretch, ugghh, no thanks, how about maintain the aspect ratio and resize within the w x h bounds.
3. Unfortunately it doesn’t maintain png transparency. Oh white, you are nice, but not in big blocks around images that used to have transparency.
If those three items were fixed this script would be absolutely perfect.
Especially if crop did an aspect correct zoom then crop.
I’d be happy to work with you to provide examples of the above three issues.
Thanks again for the fabulous contribution.
9:14 am
im getting an error saying
“Invalid src mime type: unknown”
what does this mean????
2:42 pm
Unfortunatly I get the same error:
Warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons in
../scripts/timthumb.php on line 186
Invalid src mime type: unknown
How can I fix this?
4:41 pm
Can you guys post live examples of your errors? Also, have you confirmed with your host that GD library is installed?
12:50 pm
Guys, go ahead and grab the latest copy from the Google Code site. It should fix any mime type issues.
8:49 am
Mhm,
image is uploaded through custom-field and there, but the image doesnt pop up, only the alt tag.
Checked the paths- all right. Code also ok as is the gd libary for php.
Idea what could have happened?
Cheers, Os.
7:20 pm
I’ve got it working! :D :D
I found another version of TimThumb @ http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php
Thanx for your time, support and the script!
7:18 am
thanks for this
7:51 pm
Juuuust beautyfull! works like a machine! nice job brother!
1:39 am
timthumb with slimbox
thank you Darren!
1:43 am
Great work, Johan!
9:58 am
looks ok! I’m using phpthumb right now and I can’t find much difference in speed between the two. did you do a comparison?
obviously the features are nowhere near as elaborate as phpthumb but I only need the resize & crop function so I’m considering a switch. the only feature I’d like to see added is the ability to use external images, like so:
10:00 am
oops, I had no idea html was allowed here. I meant to say:
src=”/timthumb/scripts/timthumb.php?src=http://mydomain.com/sample.jpg&h=150&w=150&zc=1″
11:35 am
Thanks for sharing, Darren!
But I have a question. I want all of files in cache folder are deleted automatically when a page is loaded complete. How can I do that?
Thanks again!
11:26 am
I’ve been looking for a script like this for a long time and I’m so happy that I’ve finally found it! Big thanks and big thumbs (excuse the pun) up to the author! Fabulous! :-)
3:09 pm
Anyway to make this script generate thumbnails from flash video?
4:50 pm
can anyone offer a solution to make this work with wordpress? I am having trouble getting it to work.
I am doing this to pull the custom field image:
<img src=”/scripts/timthumb.php?src=ID, “custom-field-name”, true); ?>&h=150&w=150&zc=1″ alt=”" />
when I look at the source code after the page has rendered, everything looks correct, but the image does not appear.
should not be a server issue because I have run phpthumb on this server successfully.
anyone got a better solution to incorporate this into a wordpress tempplate?
10:54 am
Hi Guys,
Would this class work for a high resolution image.. lets say over 3MB..
I tried and it works for all images less than 2MB and does not for over…
Cheers,
Dave
7:05 pm
Anyway to make this script generate thumbnails from flash video?
Not currently.
I am doing this to pull the custom field image:
Unless your /scripts/ folder is actually in the root, that’s not going to work. It needs to point to the /scripts/ folder inside your theme.
Would this class work for a high resolution image.. lets say over 3MB..
It’s not currently equipped to handle hi-res images that big.
2:56 pm
I can make it works …. please help me how do i make it work with Wordpress last version???
Please i love this plugin… write me an email please
6:00 am
Hey There, I love this plugin, and I will be using it with the Arthemia theme, But I just can’t get it to work on my server, when I use it on my local machine with Wamp it works fine, but it just doesn’t want to work on my server.
I checked that the Cache is 777, and that the server has PHP 4.5 or higher but still nothing. The argument that the IMG tag send is 100% valid. I just can’t understand why this doesn’t wanna work.
If you have time, your help will be greatly appreciated.
Dimitrio
5:46 am
Regarding the cache, any issues with deleting it? I’m building up a lot of unused images in the cache. Thanks!
5:54 am
CL:
No issue with deleting the images in your cache folder. Feel free to delete the cache anytime. If the script can’t find an image in the cache it creates a new one, so deleting your cache just forces the script to create new resized images.
I’d look at your .htaccess to make sure your rewrite rules are set correctly if your cache isn’t being utilized properly.
The following should be in the end of your main .htaccess file:
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE:%{HTTP:If-Modified-Since}]
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH:%{HTTP:If-None-Match}]
Hope that helps! Cheers.
1:16 pm
Hi there,
Love the possibilities of this script :)
Is there a way to use this script to bring in a random image from a folder?
Any suggestions greatly appreciated :)
Thank you
12:26 pm
Really neat script. I have used a similar one for EE.
This comment is really for clarification on the following:
Is there any way to set max values for width/height? and avoid distortion?
w: width
h: height
Unclear about how this parameter works
zc: zoom crop (0 or 1)
Unclear about how this parameter works
q: quality (default is 75 and max is 100)
Do I simply write: &q=100 for the max quality? So my string would look like this:
BTW: I have left the height blank because I want the width to be the determining resize variable.
Any clarity on this would be greatly appreciated and useful for all.
Many thanks,
Josh
12:27 pm
My code block didn’t come through…another try:
4:24 pm
We tried phpthumb and a lot other scripts like this, but all of them are to slow for high traffic. We must use external links like scr=”http://domain.com/images/image.jpg….” to store the images on a separated server.
Does anyone know a script that runs realy realy fast? We recently bougt a very simple script that uses database chaching and store de images on de DB. This is the fastest script that we found, but we want more speed. Any suggestions?
4:33 pm
@Josh: are you using character entities for the brackets when you paste the code?
@Jacobo: have you tried the latest version of the script, plus the htaccess rules? Depending on your CMS, you should also be able to apply additional caching rules.
2:41 pm
Sorry. Should it read…see below:
Unclear about how this parameter works
q: quality (default is 75 and max is 100)
Do I simply write: &q=100 for the max quality? So my string would look like this:
<img src="http://localhost.local/imageresize/scripts/timthumb.php?src=images/9780811864305_norm.jpg&h=&w=100&zc=0&q=100" alt="" />Thanks,
Josh
3:38 pm
@josh: yep, that’s right.
4:32 pm
and to follow up on the zoom parameter:
how does this work?
Unclear about how this parameter works
zc: zoom crop (0 or 1)
Thanks for the info.
Josh
10:46 pm
I believe the parameters just distinguish if the script crops from the top-left vs. crops from the middle and zooms outward.
4:41 pm
This script don’t work with an external image like:
Is there a way to make this work?
We need to run this in a separated server.
Regards,
3:03 pm
Hello, I am using your timthumb script and for some reason the images do not show in firefox, however they show in IE just fine. On other servers I have tested on they images display fine in firefox but on this other server I am using it does not display the images in Firefox but rather just shows the text of the ALT attribute. Then when i go directly to the image address (url://timthumb?src=image) it shows the image as the URL? i dont understand, any ideas?
4:22 pm
@Jacobo: The script is deliberately not supposed to allow accessing remote images to prevent bandwidth theft.
@casey: that’s strange, I haven’t heard of that. Feel free to email me a link.