Question

How can I take a 500×500 (or any sized) image that has been uploaded to the server and generate a new image from defined specific x,y coordinates? For example (0,0) to (50,0); (0,50) to (50,50). Rather than resizing an image down to 50x50px, I want to grab the top left part of an image and in a sense “crop” it to use as a thumbnail.

How can I go about doing this in PHP?

Answer 1

You want to use imagecopy. First create an image with the dimensions you want and then use imagecopy to a portion of the source image into the new image:

// use whatever mechanism you prefer to load your source image into $image
$width = 50;
$height = 50;
// Define your starting coordinates in the source image.
$source_x = 20;
$source_y = 100;
$new_image = imagecreatetruecolor($width, $height);
imagecopy($new_image, $image, 0, 0, $source_x, $source_y, $width, $height);
// Now $new_image has the portion cropped from the source and you can output or save it.
imagejpeg($new_image);