Over the past few months I've been building up a library of imaging functions that I seem to end up using over-and-over again in my web development projects. On this website alone, I've added automatic thumbnailing, grayscale image conversion and CSS Sprite generation to supplement the various iterations of design I've been through. This has been especially visible on the recent redesign of the home-page, where imagery became the foundation of the design rather than an adjunct to it.

The imaging library I've built has become indispensable to me and, as it's so very useful, I thought I'd package it up and release it under a GPL so that others can benefit from it too.

Image Director is a PHP script which uses the GD Graphics Library to perform image manipulations on-the-fly, without changing/damaging the source image in any way.

Image Director is able to generate thumbnails, add drop-shadows, add "wet floor" reflections, create CSS Sprites, convert colour images to grayscale and more - and it can apply many of these processes cumulatively. It will process images on request and incorporates an internal caching system for the images it creates in order to keep its footprint to a minimum.

It's a sublime imaging tool for web-developers and content producers alike.

Interested? I've put a few pages together with more details and the downloadables. What are you waiting for?