tip - managing thumbnails

Hi all

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere - I couldn't find anything, so hopefully it will help. I was trying to work with an image and its thumbnail, e.g. image.jpg and image_th.jpg - but encountered problems when trying to display the thumbnail on the page. The various forum posts I've seen (and the instructions) suggest having an extra field in the database to hold the thumbnail name. However, I'd rather keep the database uncluttered - plus I may want to have 3 different sized thumbnails - or 10 or 20 (unlikely, I know) - and don't want to create additional fields to accommodate them.

So, what I do is:

Have one image field in the database. On upload this is stored in images/props/ and has the filename image.jpg

I can then have as many thumbnail sizes as I want - but each one is just the filename (with no _th addition) and points to a different folder for each image size e.g.

images/prop/thumb150/
images/prop/thumb300/

Then, on the page where you want to display the thumbnail, you point to the filename field in the database and link it to the appropriate folder - if you then decide you want a different sized thumbnail displayed, just change the path to the appropriate folder.

HTH
Cheers
Chris