a bit of guidance

[phppup]

It's always these seemingly simple tasks that become challenges.

I got a good handle on how to watermark some photos (thanks to respondents to my previous post) and developed a script that calls a function that uses imagettftext()

Essentially, I can upload multiple images and watermark them before they reach their destination folder.

Good stuff.

Now, I got this crazy idea of watermarking them with a sequence number, so that if I grab 12 images, each will be labeled with it's sequence number (rather than a standard text watermark).

I placed $count++ in my script, and then used $count as my $watermark both inside imagettftext and as a variable.

It didn't work.

The closest I got was after placing $count++ inside a watermark function, but. of course, that merely labeled each photo with a "1" (bc each call of the function was a new iteration. 

Can someone please offer some direction here.

Thanks.

 

[requinix]

If you have problem getting your code to work then a good first step would be to post said code.

[phppup]

Yes, yes, the code.

But first, I'd like to try to resolve this with some education. (especial since I've managed to get the basics of the code working). And I'm wondering if I may be creating my web of complications unnecessarily.

So here's a question (that may unravel some mystery and resolve my issues): are there a set of BEST PRACTICES for handling images?

After I have uploaded several images, I want to resize and watermark them.

At first, my thought process was to create separate functions and call them accordingly

upload(); resize ();  watermark ();

Then I wondered whether I was creating unnecessary redundancy and server load. Am I grabbing the image and writing it to my /images_folder and then grabbing it again to resize and overwrite it, then re-grabbing it and watermarking it and re-overwriting it again?  Is that creating workload?

Is it better to nest the watermarking function within the resizing for a more streamlined flow? Or does that create impracticalities of it's own?

[ginerjm]

I would upload the images and resize them to a separate folder and use THOSE for my web page.  Perhaps a click response on a reduced one could take the user to the full size one on a separate page?

This eliminates the need to repeatedly re-size images for every user.

[Barand]

7 hours ago, phppup said:

Is it better to nest the watermarking function within the resizing for a more streamlined flow? Or does that create impracticalities of it's own?

It all depends on your requirements.

• Do you ever have a requirement for a reduced-size version that does not have a watermark?
• Do you want to store the original full-size image with or without the watermark? Note that as soon as you manipulate the uploaded image you lose any exif data (such as rotation).
• Do you require different sizes of images (thumbnail for product listings and medium when viewing individual product, say)?