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I'm using jQuery Supersized to display a full screen background slideshow on my blog, and I'm using mobile detection to serve a smaller version of the images to mobile devices so it will load faster.

Which option do you think would be better?

  1. Use TimThumb to dynamically resize the image size and jpeg quality
  2. On upload of the image, create another version for mobile devices e.g. myimage_mobile.jpg

Also, how do these conversion options compare in quality to resizing in photoshop?

Thanks

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  • Better in terms of?
    – Devise
    Sep 26, 2011 at 1:44
  • Well, in terms of both image quality compared to each other and compared to Photoshop and in terms of loading speed. Will TimThumb take longer to load as it has to resize the image on the fly?
    – fxfuture
    Sep 26, 2011 at 2:29
  • Also, more importantly, does TimThumb have to load the original file first or is this done server side?
    – fxfuture
    Sep 26, 2011 at 2:41

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WordPress and TimThumb both use GD to resize images, so quality is going to be similar. GD's resize quality is not as good as Photoshop, you'll notice this especially in fine details.

Both WP and TimThumb can be modified to use ImageMagick, WP via a plugin, TimThumb I think requires you edit the code directly, which is not ideal. ImageMagick will give better results, but you obviously have to be able to install it on your server.

TimThumb creates images on-the-fly, but caches them so subsequent requests will pull the image from cache.

As for my opinion, I would stick with native WordPress functions to keep things simple, especially in light of the recent TimThumb exploit that compromised a lot of WordPress sites.

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    Perfect thank you. WP and ImageMagick sounds like the way to go then
    – fxfuture
    Sep 26, 2011 at 5:04

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