Freek.dev

We'll cover resizing, image optimization, and UI enhancements and show how Spatie's packages and products can make the whole process easier, more efficient, and even a bit fun.

Read more [spatie.be]

There might be many reasons you need to add text on top of an existing image.

Read more [rias.be]

Fascinating read by Aaron Francis on how he used Netlify to generate dynamic OG images.

Read more [www.netlify.com]

For Artisan School, I wanted to create custom Open Graph images for each video page. When somebody shares a link on social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter use the OG image to represent the shared link. I'll show you how to use Browsershot and Tailwind CSS to generate and save the OG images.

Read more [protone.media]

Erika Heidi created a nice solution to generate and update cover images on your Twitter account. In this blog post she explains it all.

Read more [dev.to]

Over at Laravel News Povilas Korop wrote a nice tutorial on how to use our medialibrary (we released a new major version a couple of days ago).

By default, the Laravel registration form contains only the name, email, and password, but often it’s useful to allow the user to upload a photo or an avatar. In this tutorial we will show you an easy way to add it, using Spatie’s Media Library package.

https://laravel-news.com/uploading-avatar-images

It's a good tutorial but there's a few things not mentioned. At the end of the post you'll see this line of code:

Auth::user()->getMedia('avatars')->first()->getUrl('thumb');

That can be written a bit shorter as :

Auth::user()->getFirstMediaUrl('avatars', 'thumb');

The new v7 of the medialibrary has a new feature called "single file collections", which is just perfect for this example. Take a look at the docs: https://docs.spatie.be/laravel-medialibrary/v7/working-with-media-collections/defining-media-collections#single-file-collections

Read more

Over at Sitepoint Christoper Pitt shares some research he has done in finding differences in images using PHP.

I recently stumbled across a fascinating question: how could I tell whether an image had changed significantly? As PHP developers, the most troublesome image problem we have to deal with is how to resize an upload with an acceptable loss of quality.

In the end I discovered what many before me have – that this problem becomes relatively simple given the application of some fundamental mathematical principles. Come along with me as we learn about them…

https://www.sitepoint.com/finding-differences-in-images-with-php

Read more

Glide is an easy to use image manipulation library by Jonathan Reinink. It was bumped to version 1.0.0 a few days ago. Glide can created optimized images on the fly by levering url's such as /img/users/1.jpg?w=300&h=400&fit=crop. Take a look at the example in the Glide documentation to know more.

I think Glide provides a very nice API to create image manipulations. Unfortunately it isn't very easy to use the API to generate an image using code. So I created a little package for that called laravel-glide. All new major versions of Spatie packages will require PHP 7, laravel-glide is no exception to this.

Here's an example of how to create a greyscale version image with a maximum width of 50 pixels.

GlideImage::create($pathToImage)
    ->modify(['filt'=>'greyscale', 'w'=> 50])
    ->save($pathToWhereToSaveTheManipulatedImage);

Take a look at Glide's image API to see which parameters you can pass to the modify-method.

Read more

Update added on 14th november 2017: Adding imagick on a forge provisioned server is now as simple as running sudo apt-get install php-imagick

Today I set up some PHP 7 servers on Forge. Those servers are going to be used to host some Blender based projects. Blender uses laravel-medialibrary to convert images. The package uses Imagick to do that. It turns out the Imagick PHP 7 extension isn't released yet. But there's an RC2 release candidate. Pascal Baljet provided this script to compile and install the extension.

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$EUID" -ne 0 ]
  then echo "Please run as root"
  exit
fi

apt-get install pkg-config libmagickwand-dev -y
cd /tmp
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/imagick-3.4.0RC2.tgz
tar xvzf imagick-3.4.0RC2.tgz
cd imagick-3.4.0RC2
phpize
./configure
make install
rm -rf /tmp/imagick-3.4.0RC2*
echo extension=imagick.so >> /etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini
service php7.0-fpm restart
service nginx restart

I was a bit worried that the extension would be unstable, but all image manipulations that I need on my projects (cropping and resizing some stuff), just worked. Mandatory disclaimer: your mileage may vary.

Read more