The feedback on the new Image Manager Extended 2.0 has been great and work continues to improve the plugin features and stability.
This update fixes thumbnailing on upload and adds a few back-end improvements to make thumbnailing and resizing easier to use and more stable on servers with lower memory limits.
Upload Resize and Thumbnail
The Transform options in the Upload dialog have had a bit of a rework to try and make them easier to use and deal with some confusion around the use of the Proportional checkbox. This has been replaced by a chain link icon which controls how changes in the width and height fields are calculated, ie: if the chain link is unbroken, any change to the width field will result in the height field value being changed proportionately. If the link is broken, any values can be added to each field.
Regardless of the values in the Resize width and height fields, the aspect ratio of the uploaded image will always be maintained when resizing - images will not be stretched or cropped.
I should point out here that Resizing on Upload is now done using the client (your browser) on all modern browsers. It should now be possible to upload and resize large images without worrying about server memory issues.
The Thumbnail option however will crop the thumbnail image to fit within the supplied dimensions if required. You can still create thumbnails that are proportional to the uploaded image by only supplying a width or height value.
Thumbnail Editor
A minor change to the Thumbnail Editor allows you to create thumbnails by only supplying the width or height value, as with Upload Thumbnailing.
File List Icons
The Image Manager Extended has had the ability to display the file list as icons since 1.5, using either a set of dynamically created "cache" thumbnails" or a css scaled version of the original image. The cache method, which was the default action, would often caused issues on servers with low memory limits, especially when the images were large. This update adds a few changes to the improvements introduced in 2.0.
First, the Icon Cache option is disabled by default, all icons will be created using either the images associated thumbnail (if one has been created on upload or after) or a scaled version of the image. If the Icon Cache is enabled, the EXIF Thumbnail of the image, if available, will be used, otherwise an attempt will be made to create a cache thumbnail (a quick memory check is done). If this fails, or there isn't enough memory available to complete the operation, a scaled version of the image is used.
There will be a lot of improvements and tweaks done to the Image Manager Extended over the next few months as I attempt to refine and improve the usability of this popular plugin. Please submit any suggestions and requests in the Forum