Resizing images on the server

Question

We just implemented a feature where our users can upload photos. We are re-sizing what the user has uploaded into thumbnail and an 800x600 "display" size.

The problem we are having is that this operation seems to be taking up a lot of memory on our server. We are using Django-imagekit to do this and there seems to be documented problems with excessive memory usage.

We are running django on a Heroku server. In case this factors in, we are using postgresql for data and elasticsearch for search as well.

• Is there a better library that we should be using for this?
• Or is there a completely different strategy for handling user photos on the server that we should consider?

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

I don't know what django-imagekit offers but you could just use PIL and when saving an upload image resize it to the sizes that you need.

http://effbot.org/imagingbook/image.htm

Answer 2

I have used gd2 with ruby, which works pretty well. It's written in C, so it is fast and shouldn't take a whole lot of memory. It looks like there are Python bindings.

Answer 3

I have used and it works well PythonMagick and you could also try wand it is a ctypes-based ImagedMagick binding library for Python