Croppa

Croppa is an thumbnail generator bundle for Laravel 4.x and 5.x. It follows a different approach from libraries that store your thumbnail dimensions in the model, like Paperclip. Instead, the resizing and cropping instructions come from specially formatted urls. For instance, say you have an image with this path:

/uploads/09/03/screenshot.png

To produce a 300x200 thumbnail of this, you would change the path to:

/uploads/09/03/screenshot-300x200.png

This file, of course, doesn't exist yet. Croppa listens for specifically formatted image routes and build this thumbnail on the fly, outputting the image data (with correct headers) to the browser instead of the 404 response.

At the same time, it saves the newly cropped image to the disk in the same location (the "…-300x200.png" path) that you requested. As a result, all future requests get served directly from the disk, bybassing PHP and all that overhead. In other words, your app does not boot just to serve an image. This is a differentiating point compared to other, similar libraries.

Since 4.0, Croppa lets images be stored on remote disks like S3, Dropbox, FTP and more thanks to Flysystem integration.

Installation

Server Requirements:

• gd
• exif - Required if you want to have Croppa auto-rotate images from devices like mobile phones based on exif meta data.

Installation:

1. Add Croppa to your composer.json's requires: "bkwld/croppa": "~4.0". Then do a regular composer install.
2. Add Croppa as a provider in your app config's provider list: 'Bkwld\Croppa\ServiceProvider',
3. Add the facade to your app config's aliases: 'Croppa' => 'Bkwld\Croppa\Facade',

Configuration

Read the source of the config file for documentation of the config options. Here are some examples of common setups:

Local src and crops directories

The most common scenario, the src images and their crops are created in the doc_root's "uploads" directory.

return [
	'src_dir' => public_path().'/uploads',
	'crops_dir' => public_path().'/uploads',
	'path' => 'uploads/(.*)$',
];

Thus, if you have <img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/file.jpg', 200)?>">, the returned URL will be /uploads/file-200x_.jpg, the source image will be looked for at public_path().'/uploads/file.jpg', and the new crop will be created at public_path().'/uploads/file-200x_.jpg'. And because the URL generated by Croppa::url() points to the location where the crop was created, the web server (Apache, etc) will directly serve it on the next request (your app won't boot just to serve an image).

Here is another example:

return [
	'src_dir' => '/www/public/assets/images',
	'crops_dir' => '/www/public/assets/images/crops',
	'path' => 'images/(.*)$',
];

If you have <img src="<?=Croppa::url('http://domain.com/assets/images/crops/file.jpg', 200, 100)?>">, the returned URL will be http://domain.com/assets/images/crops/file-200x100.jpg, the source image will be looked for at /www/public/assets/images/file.jpg, and the new crop will be created at /www/public/assets/images/crops/file-200x100.jpg.

Src images on S3, local crops

This is a good solution for a load balanced enviornment. Each app server will end up with it's own cache of cropped images, so there is some wasted space. But the web server (Apache, etc) can still serve the crops directly on subsequent crop requests.

// Early in App bootstrapping, bind a Flysystem instance.  This example assumes
// you are using the `graham-campbell/flysystem` Laravel adapter package
// https://github.com/GrahamCampbell/Laravel-Flysystem
App::singleton('s3', function($app) {
	return $app['flysystem']->connection();
});

// Croppa config.php
return [
	'src_dir' => 's3',
	'crops_dir' => public_path().'/uploads',
	'path' => 'uploads/(.*)$',
];

Thus, if you have <img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/file.jpg', 200, 100)?>">, the returned URL will be /uploads/file-200x100.jpg, the source image will be looked for immediately within the S3 bucket that was configured as part of the Flysystem instance, and the new crop will be created at /uploads/file-200x100.jpg.

Usage

The URL schema that Croppa uses is:

/path/to/image-widthxheight-option1-option2(arg1,arg2).ext

So these are all valid:

/uploads/image-300x200.png             // Crop to fit in 300x200
/uploads/image-_x200.png               // Resize to height of 200px
/uploads/image-300x_.png               // Resize to width of 300px
/uploads/image-300x200-resize.png      // Resize to fit within 300x200
/uploads/image-300x200-quadrant(T).png // See the quadrant description below

Croppa::url($url, $width, $height, array($options))

To make preparing the URLs that Croppa expects an easier job, you can use the following view helper:

<img src="<?=Croppa::url($path, $width, $height, $options)?>" />
<!-- Examples (that would produce the URLs above) -->
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', 300, 200)?>" />
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', null, 200)?>" />
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', 300)?>" />
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', 300, 200, array('resize'))?>" />
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', 300, 200, array('quadrant' => 'T'))?>" />
<!-- Or, if there were multiple arguments for the last example -->
<img src="<?=Croppa::url('/uploads/image.png', 300, 200, array('quadrant' => array('T')))?>" />

These are the arguments that Croppa::url() takes:

• $url : The URL of your source image. The path to the image relative to the src_dir will be extracted using the path config regex.
• $width : A number or null for wildcard
• $height : A number or null for wildcard
• $options - An array of key value pairs, where the value is an optional array of arguments for the option. Supported option are:
  • resize - Make the image fit in the provided width and height through resizing. When omitted, the default is to crop to fit in the bounds (unless one of sides is a wildcard).
  • quadrant($quadrant) - Crop the remaining overflow of an image using the passed quadrant heading. The supported $quadrant values are: T - Top (good for headshots), B - Bottom, L - Left, R - Right, C - Center (default). See the PHPThumb documentation for more info.
  • trim($x1, $y1, $x2, $y2) - Crop the source image to the size defined by the two sets of coordinates ($x1, $y1, ...) BEFORE applying the $width and $height parameters. This is designed to be used with a frontend cropping UI like jcrop so that you can respect a cropping selection that the user has defined but then output thumbnails or sized down versions of that selection with Croppa.
  • trim_perc($x1_perc, $y1_perc, $x2_perc, $y2_perc) - Has the same effect as trim() but accepts coordinates as percentages. Thus, the the upper left of the image is "0" and the bottom right of the image is "1". So if you wanted to trim the image to half the size around the center, you would add an option of trim_perc(0.25,0.25,0.75,0.75)
  • quality($int) - Set the jpeg compression quality from 0 to 100.
  • interlace($bool) - Set to 1 or 0 to turn interlacing on or off

Note: Croppa will not upscale images. In other words, if you ask for a size bigger than the source, it will only create an image as big as the original source (though possibly cropped to give you the aspect ratio you requested).

Croppa::delete($url)

You can delete a source image and all of it's crops (like if a related DB row was deleted) by running:

Croppa::delete('/path/to/src.png');

Croppa::reset($url)

Similar to Croppa::delete() except the source image is preserved, only the crops are deleted.

Croppa::reset('/path/to/src.png');

croppa.js

A module is included to prepare formatted URLs from JS. This can be helpful when you are creating views from JSON responses from an AJAX request; you don't need to format the URLs on the server. It can be loaded via Require.js, CJS, or as browser global variable.

croppa.url(url, width, height, options)

Works just like the PHP Croppa::url except for how options get formatted (since JS doesn't have associative arrays).

croppa.url('/path/to/img.jpg', 300, 200, ['resize']);
croppa.url('/path/to/img.jpg', 300, 200, ['resize', {quadrant: 'T'}]);
croppa.url('/path/to/img.jpg', 300, 200, ['resize', {quadrant: ['T']}]);

Run php artisan bundle:publish croppa to have Laravel copy the JS to your public directory. It will go to /public/bundles/croppa/js by default.

History

Read the Github project releases for release notes.

This bundle uses PHPThumb to do all the image resizing. "Crop" is equivalent to it's adaptiveResize() and "resize" is … resize(). Support for interacting with non-local disks provided by Flysystem.