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Christensen, Courtney wrote:
I know how to check the archives, but I'm not sure if this would even be there. What I am really curious about is why it was decided to go with using ImageMagick to resize images, rather than just changing the width attribute of the image?
I don't know if you'll find a specific message in the archive, but the reasoning is pretty much this:
1) Many browsers do really ugly in-browser resizing; a resampled image usually looks better.
2) Many of our pictures are much larger than comfortable in-browser thumbnail sizes; a resized image file usually is smaller, so it downloads faster and saves us bandwidth, and therefore money.
A multi-megapixel digital camera image or high-resolution scan can run several megabytes, whereas a nice thumbnail might be 70-150 kilobytes.
As for choosing ImageMagick specifically; it was available, free, and did the job. :) Using a separate process also has advantages in that failures or out-of-memory conditions can be contained more easily.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)