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If one were to create a site where users could upload images in various formats (JPG, PDF, etc.) and process that image into one monochrome GIF copy and a PDF, what would be the best infrastructure for doing so?

I know that there is already a question about image processing infrastructure, but I would like to know what specific method would be recommended for PHP.

Should I script a PHP background job? Should I store the list of images to process in a database? Should the processing of the images take place in the uploading PHP script?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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  • the "best" solution will depend on image sizes and transaction volumes. please specify. Commented Oct 1, 2010 at 5:20
  • stillstanding: The average image size should be about that of an average person's scanner's resolution (600x600, or something like that) except in the size of a page. I doubt I can estimate transaction volumes at this point. :) Commented Oct 1, 2010 at 5:34

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It's pretty easy to call an ImageMagick binary to do things to an image. And modern servers are more than fast enough to do it as part of the post-upload processing before returning the success page to the end-user. I work on a commercial site that does exactly that for user uploads and we've never had a problem.

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Very interesting. Thanks, I'll run some tests on this, then get back with a reply.
Alright, it seems to work perfectly fine! Thank all of you for your answers.
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I would store the uploaded images into a filesystem, not database, and have an external/standalone component take care of the image processing. That component could be anything from a Java to Perl application, not necessarily php.

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So you would opt for a long-running process in the background looking through the filesystem for images to process?
Yep. It decouples the uploading part from any processing of the images.

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