Pipe plugin thumbnails through TimThumb

[Donovan Keith]

Some of the plugin thumbnails are aliased because they're higher resolution than the space provided - it might be nice to pipe them through TimThumb on the CV server to get them anti-aliased at the correct size.

[Rick Barrett]

3 options:

• Do this on a case-by-case basis by replacing the image link in the XML with the tm path

• Route all thumbnails through timthumb (with the timthumb url and settings hard-coded into the plugin)

• Add an XML flag that forces the thumbnail through timthumb (with the timthumb url and settings hard-coded into the plugin)

[Donovan Keith]

I say automatically pipe it through TimThumb for all of them just in case we want to update the aspect ratio/crop of the thumbnails at some point. Only one change vs tens/hundreds.

That said, just make sure you verify that TimThumb sends you back an image, and if it doesn't just use the direct link to the image with the crappy aliasing.

If you'd rather not use TimThumb I'm sure that Python has an image processing library of some kind, the advantage of TimThumb is that it can take a 1080P file and generate a 300px thumbnail which is also fewer kb to send over the web.

-Donovan

[Rick Barrett]

that's just an html window containing an <img> link. I don't really think there's a way to make sure TimThumb sends me back an image, without caching all the images and having the image links be local. Caching the images is out for v1 - so we have to take what we get from TimThumb.