We already have routines (bits of code) that rescale images to a maximum size on upload for you. The server config has a limit on file size, so then the only other reason not to load a massive pic is the upload time on the small upload pipe that adsl gives you. We scale down to say 1024 on upload if needed. That way files aren't unnecessarialy large on disk.
For display we also have routines that will take this image and automatically resize as thumbnail for us. Non of this 'take big image and simply change width/height in html for browser to do the scaling' kind of thing that you see on some sites. You know, where the article loads and then the image follows by slowly drawing down. You can tell if the coder has been lazy in this way if when you right-click to view image it comes back up as the massive version.
On the open-source side of things there are a few alternaitve image scalers around. One of the most popular is imagemagik. We happen to use imlib2. The only problem we have is that is the php-imlib2 extension (the bit that couples php to tjis library) isn't that well supported out of the box. We end up compiling our own version from sources. imlib2 is good once it is working in that it is really fast and does a nice job of ani-aliasing scaled images (no grainy or fuzzy bits on them).
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