Creating an image made of other images

[Sevenupcan]

I'd like to know if it is possible to save or create an image made up of other images.

The easiest way I can think of would be to have all the images as transparent pngs of the same height and width and then merge them together.

Is it possible to do this in PHP?

Many thanks,

Gavin

[TommyBs]

Hey,

You need to look into using the GD library more specifically imagecreate and imagecopymerge

there's a lot of documents on the php.net site and plenty of other tutorials around

http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

[samarudge]

For doing something like this you should realy look into imagemagik etc. as GD is very CPU intensive and lower quality

[Sevenupcan]

Hey,

Thanks very much for this. I wasn't sure if PHP did this kind of stuff and to what sort of quality. I will look up imagemagik Thanks again.

[samarudge]

Image magik is a command line tool so it gets its own little "lump" of memory whereas gd runs of the memory already given to PHP. There will be now difference in quality HOWEVER magik is faster and safer because if GD was to crash it would take down your entire PHP thread and if you were running off an Apache server, crash the host. Although it is very unlikely to happen, magik or any other command line tool will be much more reliable because if it were to crash it would just kill that session (the image being created) and one user might not see an image but the server would remain stable.