Aqua Resizer: The Efficient Solution for Image Resizing in WordPress Themes
As a theme author, you know how challenging it can be to resize images on WordPress. Fortunately, there are several methods and scripts available that provide this functionality. One of the most popular scripts used by theme authors is Timthumb, but it has some drawbacks that force authors to look for alternatives. There is also the “native” way of doing it using the add_image_size() function, which leaves tons of unused images on the server. Additionally, Victor Teixeira came up with the vt_resize script that was then quickly adopted by WooThemes – unfortunately, its usability is quite limited and in some cases too complicated to use.
Enter Aqua Resizer, a small script that dynamically resizes, crops, and scales images uploaded through WordPress on the fly. It is native, meaning it uses WordPress built-in functions to automatically process the images. While not claiming to be better than the above methods, Aqua Resizer provides an easy, fast, secure, and efficient way to handle image resizing in your WordPress themes.
Features of Aqua Resizer
– Completely native, using WordPress built-in functions
– Works both on multisite and single WordPress install
– Just feed in URL, instead of using attachment id and all those stuff
– Optional cropping
– Can crop an already cropped image
– Lightweight – can be minified down to only 50 lines of codes!
– Cache images (duh)
– Completely open source
Sample Usage
To use Aqua Resizer, simply feed in the URL of the image you want to resize, along with the desired width and height. You can also choose whether or not to crop the image. Here’s an example:
$thumb = get_post_thumbnail_id();
$img_url = wp_get_attachment_url( $thumb,’full’); // Get img URL
$image = aq_resize( $img_url, 560, 310, true ); // Resize & crop img ?>
