If you’ve done much with PHP you’ve probably come across its image handling libraries. Normally this involves using either the GD, or ImageMagick.
These work reasonably well, but there are a number of disadvantages:
- The APIs are thin wrappers around the relevant image libraries. Neither of them offer particularly developer-friendly APIs, and the two APIs aren’t equal enough to make switching between them simple.
- You have to know which library your server has in order to start developing, or make extra work, and support both.
On a recent project I needed to do image manipulation (thumbnail generation etc.), and came across the Intervention Image library. This is a PHP library that can be used in any PHP project, and offers a much improved API for working with images. The API is agnostic to whether you’re using ImageMagick, or GD, so you can swap between them at will without having to re-code your application.
Next time you’re working with images, check out Intervention Image.