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I’ve been playing around with ImageMagick, the defacto tool under Linux and most unixes, heck, pretty much anything with a command line, for doing image manipulations. It’s great, it’s got tons of features. But it has one major problem.

Try resizing a large image. Takes a few seconds, and doesn’t give you any feedback. Now try batch resizing 50 large images. Takes forever, and there’s no feedback.

I’m sure the developers probably consider it extra cruft that would weigh the apps down and make them take even longer, but I wish the command line applications would give you some kind of status feedback (a dot per percent or something would do, with the ability to redirect it to a file). In fact, I’ve been unable to find a single command line graphics tool for unix that does.

I’ve been looking for a way to provide file upload status feedback in php for a couple of personal projects I’ve been working on. I’ve found a couple of java applets, and one very ugly perl + php hack, until today.

pdoru has a set of patches against php, with an extension module, that adds the needed functionality to read this information called upload-progress-meter. The latest patch, against php-5.0RC3, applies without difficulty to php-5.0.3, and the extension works great. The only thing I don’t like about it is the need to constantly refresh the progress meter page. However, there’s a nifty way around this using XMLHttpRequest() in javascript.

nifty, even if it does require recompiling php.