Clay

Well, i am currently updating my WordPress plugin. I faced a problem in the past to retrieve image width to determine whether a particular image is require to resize. The problem here is that checking a particular image height and width is expensive job. In order to not impact the loading time of the site using my plugin, i forfeited the capability of resizing and resize the image regardless of the size. The plugin works fine since the resizing is doing it on the fly. However, problems arise when a smaller image is being resize and this is not a desirable result. Therefore, i would like to see whether there is a solution exist that can easily solve my problem.

Getting Image size using getImageSize()

Obviously, the task here is talking about PHP, we will look at the getImageSize() functionality exist within the naive php function. I personally was using this on the plugin to determine the size of the image. However, i immediately removed this after i notice the impact this functionality has caused on my site.

The reason? Remote image will need to be downloaded into your server and then it will be read locally by php. The pitfall here is the time used to download remotely to your server. If all your image is in your server and not somewhere else like in a CDN, this might not be a problem.

Better solutions

Well, the better solutions to get image quickly is to create your own script to retrieve the first few bytes of the file since the size of the image is located there. Credit goes to James @ zifiniti.com for the script below,

<?php
   function getimagesize($image_url){
    $handle = fopen ($image_url, "rb");
    $contents = ""; 
    if ($handle) {
    do {
        $count += 1;
        $data = fread($handle, 8192);
        if (strlen($data) == 0) {
            break;
       }   
    $contents .= $data;
    } while(true);
    } else { return false; }
    fclose ($handle);

    $im = ImageCreateFromString($contents);
    if (!$im) { return false; }
    $gis[0] = ImageSX($im);
    $gis[1] = ImageSY($im);
    // array member 3 is used below to keep with current getimagesize standards
    $gis[3] = "width={$gis[0]} height={$gis[1]}";
    ImageDestroy($im);
    return $gis;                                                                                                                                                       
   }   
}
?>

Assuming you have a large image file, this can really come in handle and reduce the time needed to load a site. But, its still slow! xD