Image resizing

Using 3rd party components while essential, can also be a headache. All to often you can find yourself spending hours following the setup instructions to the letter only for it to not work. Other times you know it's the exact component you want to use but it seems while the guys may have spent a huge effort in writing to component they seemingly never got round to writing anything to tell you how to use it.

Every so often though I come across a component that works first time and does exactly what you want. One such component that I've found this with recently ImageResizer.

I needed a simple way for images to be resized for a product listing on an eCommerce platform written in Classic ASP. Image resizing can be a real pain, there's the decision of do you do it when the images are uploaded or on the fly, if you do it on the fly there's a a huge number of mistakes you can make and nearly every example of how to do image resizing includes a couple of them. Then lastly in either scenario you need to make sure the end result is actually decent quality.

With image resizer I was done in 5 minutes! It's actually a .NET component rather than Classic ASP but that wasn't an issue. You create a bin folder, add a couple of simple lines to your web.config file then put an extra extension on the image path plus parameters for the size you want and that's it!

If your doing a .NET project it's also available on NuGet making it even easier to get up and running.