Resize/crop/pad a picture to a fixed size

Question

I need to resize a picture to a fixed size. But it has to keep the factors between the width and height.

Say I want to resize a picture from 238 (w) X 182 (

Answer 1

Just a tip for high-quality fast thumbnail generation from large images: (from the php.net site)

If you do the thumbnail generation in two stages:

1. From original to an intermediate image with twice the final dimensions, using a fast resize
2. From the intermediate image to the final thumbnail using a high-quality resample

then this can be much faster; the resize in step 1 is relatively poor quality for its size but has enough extra resolution that in step 2 the quality is decent, and the intermediate image is small enough that the high-quality resample (which works nicely on a 2:1 resize) proceeds very fast.