Update on GD vs ImageMagick

I decided it wasn't fair for me to compare gd and imagemagick when I was calling imagemagick through exec( "convert image.jpg -thumbnail 100x TN_image.jpg" ) so I decided to install the extension for php called imagick.

This had to be installed to PECL, it didn't work on my ubuntu 7.10 by just doing apt-get install php5-imagick.

Nice examples of how to use imagick on Mikko's blog. I couldn't follow his examples though as the version that was installed through PECL didn't have some of the functions he used. Would have been nice to put shadows on my thumbnails though.

Anyways I made the script that creates thumbnails through imagick and compared it to the script in my gallery that uses GD. It seems GD was ahead by just a bit this time, although the quality of the imagick thumbnails were far superior, probably because I had set the GD functions to use less resolution.


GD TEST


From this example the images were really huge (3000x4500 pixels 1.5-2mb), the thumbnails rendered by GD seems pixelated compared to what imagick produced.

IMAGICK TEST


Imagick created 12 thumbnails with very nice quality but was 2 seconds slower than GD.

Powered by ScribeFire.

GD vs ImageMagick

Well I've seen some code in php.net about creating thumbnails fast, basically some guy wrote an alternative to imagecopyresampled and called it fastimagecopyresampled. I decided to see how fast it really is, so to compare I created a script that would create thumbnails from a bunch of images using ImageMagick.

And here are the results:

Using ImageMagick to generate 6 thumbnails from a gallery.



Now using GD to generate the same thumbnails, I deleted the old ones.



It is clear who the winner is, definitely GD.



References:
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopyresampled.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imagick-thumbnailimage.php
http://valokuva.org/?paged=2

Powered by ScribeFire.