Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
TimThumb Configurations
As a TimThumb user, making changes to the settings has always been a bit of a pain. It’s possible, of course, but if you make changes – and then want to update the script – then you have to make all the changes again.
To try and combat this, one of the things we did when creating TimThumb 2.0 is introduce a config file. This is a file that you can add to the same directory as timthumb.php, and use it to override the built in settings.
The file should be called timthumb-config.php and would contain a series of defines that change the default settings. The file is a PHP file and so should contain PHP code – I will add a small example at the bottom of this page.
There are a whole bunch of settings that are not controlled by the normal query string parameters.
| constant | values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| DEBUG_ON | true/ false | Turn on debug logging to the standard PHP error log |
| DEBUG_LEVEL | 1, 2, 3 | Debug level 1 is less noisy and level 3 is the most noisy |
| MEMORY_LIMIT | 30M | Set the PHP Memory Limit (30M = 30 Megabytes). Higher numbers means larger images can be resized, but also uses more server resources so may slow down your website |
| BLOCK_EXTERNAL_LEECHERS | true, fale | Stop external websites from linking to you and display ‘no linking’ image instead |
| ALLOW_EXTERNAL | true/ false | Allow images from external sites to be resized. Restricted to the images defined in the $allowed_sites array. |
| ALLOW_ALL_EXTERNAL_SITES | true/ false | Allow external images to be resized from ANY website. Note that this could be less secure! |
| FILE_CACHE_ENABLED | true/ false | Should we cache the files on disk to speed up your website? (hint: the answer is yes, unless you’re testing/ developing things! :)) |
| FILE_CACHE_TIME_BETWEEN_CLEANS | 86400 (milliseconds) | TimThumb automatically cleans up the cached files. This defines the amount of time between the different the cache cleaning. |
| FILE_CACHE_MAX_FILE_AGE | 86400 (milliseconds) | How old should a file be before it’s cleaned? |
| FILE_CACHE_SUFFIX | .timthumb.txt | What to put at the end of all files in the cache directory so we can identify them easily |
| FILE_CACHE_PREFIX | timthumb | What to put at the start of the cache files so we can identify them easily |
| FILE_CACHE_DIRECTORY | ./cache | the name of the image cache directory. Left blank it will use the system temporary directory (which is better for security, but is not supported by all web hosts) |
| MAX_FILE_SIZE | 10485760 | 10 Megs is 10485760. This is the max internal or external file size that we’ll process |
| CURL_TIMEOUT | 20 | Timeout duration for Curl. This only applies if you have Curl installed and aren’t using PHP’s default URL fetching mechanism. |
| WAIT_BETWEEN_FETCH_ERRORS | 20 | Time to wait between errors fetching remote file. |
| BROWSER_CACHE_MAX_AGE | 864000 | Browser cache duration (to prevent images from being reloaded more than once – the higher the number the better). |
| BROWSER_CACHE_DISABLE | true/ false | Use for testing if you want to disable browser caching. |
| MAX_WIDTH | 1500 | Put a sensible limit of the width of the resized image (so that crazy large images can’t be created) |
| MAX_HEIGHT | 1500 | Put a sensible limit of the height of the resized image (so that crazy large images can’t be created) |
| NOT_FOUND_IMAGE | null | Image to display if a 404 error occurs, instead of showing an error message |
| ERROR_IMAGE | null | Image to display if an error occurs, instead of showing an error message |
| PNG_IS_TRANSPARENT | null | Define if a png image should have a transparent background color. Use False value if you want to display a custom coloured canvas_colour |
The following settings alter the default values for the standard query string parameters.
| constant | values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| DEFAULT_Q | 90 | Default image compression level (Q = quality) |
| DEFAULT_ZC | 1 | Default zoom crop value – more info about the zoom crop settings can be found here |
| DEFAULT_F | null | Default image filter – more info about the filter settings can be found here |
| DEFAULT_S | 0 | Default value for sharpening an image |
| DEFAULT_CC | ffffff | Default value for the canvas colour. This is used when editing the zc values in your image. More info here. |
Example
Since it’s a PHP file the code should use the standard PHP format.
An example config would be something like:
<?php
define('ALLOW_ALL_EXTERNAL_SITES', true);
?>
