The GD Graphics Library is a graphics software library which was developed by Thomas Boutell and other developers for dynamically manipulating images.
Its native programming language is ANSI C, but it has interfaces for many other programming languages. It can create GIFs, JPEGs,PNGs, and WBMPs. GD originally stood for “GIF Draw” and can create images composed of lines, arcs, text (using program-selected fonts), other images, and multiple colors. Version 2.0 adds support for truecolor images, alpha channels, resampling (for smooth resizing of truecolor images), and many other features.
GD supports numerous programming languages including C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCaml, Tcl, Lua, Pascal, GNU Octave, REXX, and Ruby. In addition, the “Fly” command line interpreter allows for image creation (“on the fly“) using GD. GD scripts can be thus be written in potentially any language and run using this tool.
GD is extensively used with PHP, where a modified version supporting additional features is included by default as of PHP 4.3 and was an option before that. As of PHP 5.3, a system version of GD may be used as well, to get the additional features that were previously available only to the bundled version of GD.
PHP is not limited to creating just HTML output, it can also be used to create and manipulate image files in a variety of different image formats, includingGIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP, and XPM. Even more convenient, PHP can output image streams directly to a browser. You will need to compile PHP with the GDlibrary of image functions for this to work. GD and PHP may also require other libraries, depending on which image formats you want to work with.
You can use the image functions in PHP to get the size of JPEG, GIF, PNG, SWF, TIFF and JPEG2000 images.
With the exif extension, you are able to work with information stored in headers of JPEG and TIFF images. This way you can read meta data generated by digital cameras. The exif functions do not require the GD library.
Here at STG , we know that you take your code ( development ) seriously and … your images as well, so, we have collected a few of the best GD Libraries to assist you within your work related tasks. We hope you will find them helpful towards your image related tasks.
1. PHP Image Manipulation Library : Zebra Image
Zebra Image is a compact, lightweight and object oriented image manipulation library written in PHP. It provides methods for performing many image manipulation operations; it doesn’t require any external libraries other than the GS2 extension. Zebra_Image allows you to resize, flip, rotate and crop images. It supports loading and saving images in the GIF, JPEG, and PNG formats stores the transparency for GIF, PNG and PNG24
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2. Imagine : OOP Library For Image Manipulation
Imagine is an object oriented PHP library for image manipulation built in PHP 5.3. Library can easily manipulate operations on images like resizing, cropping and applying filters. It includes color class which takes two arguments in its constructor to generate RGB code and transparency percentage for any object.
It includes Font class which allows users to use any kind of font and insert text into images.
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3. Php5-image : PHP5 Image Manipulation Library
PHP5 Image is Google Service and object oriented library for an image manipulation by PHP and GD2. It is an extended version of Php-image project and can be used either standalone or inside Zend Framework projects.
The Project currently provides readers for PNG, JPEG, GIF, PSD, ICO, image file types, and outputs all GD2-supported types.
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4. Wide Image : An Open Source PHP Library For Image Manipulation
Wide Image is an object-oriented library for image manipulation. It requires PHP 5.2+ with GD2 extension. The library provides a simple way to loading, manipulation and saving images in the most common image formats. Wide Image supports all formats that are natively supported by the GD extensions on the server, Wide Image currently supporting GIF, PNG, JPG, GD, GD2, WBMP, XBM, XPM and it also supports BMP and TGA formats.
Wide Image Supports Cross-Format Conversion – you can easily load an image in one format, then save it to another.
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5. PHP Graphic Works : Advanced PHP Image Manipulation Library
WiseLoop PHP Graphic Works is a set of PHP classes designed for image manipulation on the server side. This package allows complex image processing in an easy and flexible manner, by using only a bunch of code. It allows rotate, crop, resize, stretch, and flip operations on images. It includes huge collection of image filters such as blur, sepia, grayscale, negative, contrast, brightness, gamma and many more. It also includes some special effects like puzzle, noise, pixelrate, reflection, emboss edge and sketch.
The most important feature of PHP Graphic Works is it supports caching for fast processing. Exhaustive documentation and lightweight, live rendering, image folder batch processing are few exceptional features that make this library far away from its rivalries. Though developers have to pay for this but it’s worth paying library to overcome all their image related issues.
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