What is your take: TimThumb vs. WordPress Thumbnails? The great debate

1 Views

When it comes to excerpts, do you believe TimThumb or WordPress thumbnails is the way to go? And why? Answers will not be graded (but may be criticized).

Post Views: 1

Related posts

Leave a Reply

4 comments

  1. In my opinion the built in <?php add_image_size( $name, $width, $height, $crop ); ?> function is much more flexible, easy and with less overhead. It does resize-crop, so I don’t see a reason to go back to TimThumb (which I used extensively in the past).

  2. WordPress image handling, without question.

    The only thing that TimThumb has that is currently not possible with core image handling is zoom crop. Everything else can be accomplished using core image handling, including on-the-fly resizing.

    I see absolutely no advantage to using TimThumb, and only disadvantages. It was a great tool prior to WordPress 2.9, but has been essentially unnecessary since then.

    EDIT

    Advantages to using core system:

    1. Familiar UI (Media Manager, “Featured Image” metabox), rather than custom fields
    2. Implement in template using core WordPress functions
    3. Less overhead
    4. Cross-Theme support
    5. Thumbnail image handling remains extensible via Plugin
    6. Thumbnail image handling maintains forward-compatibility with WordPress core

  3. Timthumb’s ONLY advantage is in reducing the quantity of files stored on the server. By default WordPress creates 3 images from each upload. If you add additional sizes it will create a new image file for each of those as well.

    Basic Usage:
    1000 Posts with an average of 5 images per post will produce a minimum of 15,000 images.

    Using 5 custom sizes for the crop value used in post listings, etc…
    1000 Posts with an average of 5 images per post will produce a minimum of 40,000 images.

    Shared hosting environments can limit the number of files on a server to 50,000 or less… thus the helpful use of timthumb which would keep the files stored lower.

    That’s my 2 cents….