Broken thumbnails (sometimes) with TimThumb

Question

Reinstalled theme with latest version of TimThumb (was previously effected by the vulnerability issue). Now most of my thumbnails work, but some do not. My theme relies on this plugin, so I'm not sure I have any other option but to use TimThumb, but this is pretty frustrating. The worse thing is that the bug is only effecting certain photos of mine but not the rest. Clicking on the broken thumbnail directs to the full size image, so the image itself is good, but no matter what I do, that thumbnail won't generate. I've tried renaming the files, re-exporting from the master .psd file to a jpg with a different name, changing the total size of the image, even changing the color space, and nothing can convince this plugin to create a thumbnail for certain of my photos. What the hell is going on? Any insight is appreciated. www.redtownphoto.com Checkout "Test" in my menu to see what I'm referring to.

Thanks in advance for any help. I could sure use it.

update 2 complete galleries have now died on me suddenly and thumbnails are completely broken. It looks like this issue is worse than I thought.

Answer 1

99% of the issues I've had similar to this were when TimThumb simply ran out of memory. There's usually a direct correlation between image size and memory usage. The bigger the image is, the higher the chances it will run out of memory.

To get a better idea of the error, access the timthumb url directly in your browser (not to the full-size image, to the generated one). Usually Timthumb will spit-out an error that will let you know why it failed to generate it.