Thumbnails in PHP

Depending upon how it's done, displaying a page of thumbnail images can be very cumbersome. Allowing the browser to resize images requires the client browser to download the entire, full-size image, then clumsily resize the image to a specified size. This causes the page to load very slowly and creates unavoidable distortion in the resulting images. The other option is to make separate thumbnail images for each individual image. This is fine if you only plan to display a few images, but becomes unrealistic on a large scale or a site involving dynamic images. Fortunately there are ways around these problems using the GD library in PHP.