PHP/JS - Create thumbnails on the fly or store as files
image, image-manipulation, javascript, php, thumbnails
Solution
Save thumbnails to disk. Image processing takes a lot of resources and, depending on the size of the image, might exceed the default allowed memory limit for php. It is less of a concern if you have your own server with only your application running but it still takes a lot of cpu power and memory to resize images. If you're considering creating thumbnails on the fly anyway, you don't have to change much - upon the first request, create the thumbnail from the source file, save it to disk and upon subsequent requests just read it off the disk.
Problem
For an image hosting web application: For my stored images, is it feasible to create thumbnails on the fly using PHP (or whatever), or should I save 1 or more different sized thumbnails to disk and just load those? Any help is appreciated.