Tutorial : Custom image manipulation in Drupal in just a few lines of code with the ImageAPI module

For those of you who don’t know imagecache: it’s a very cool module that generates resized and/or cropped versions of images you upload to your Drupal site. You define different “presets”, indicate what actions (resize, crop, desaturate, ...) need to be performed in what order, and all these image versions will be available alongside the original image you uploaded. In addition, it also does caching and some other intelligent stuff.

Basically, imagecache is what you need if you want to generate thumbnails (think user profiles and image galleries), and different size and/or quality versions (like flickr).

Way cool.

Now, with version 2.x, the actual image manipulation actions have been abstracted to a second module ImageAPI. ImageAPI supports multiple image manipulation libraries. GD is fully supported and imagemagick support is added, but still experimental.

The api allows you to perform any manipulation you want, when you want, how you want, without the need of installing the entire imagecache module.

[Read more..]

Courtesy : Symbiotix.net