Successfully Use PHP & ImageMagick

Today I’m sharing some example code to do the following all in one PHP script:

• search Bing for an image given a keyword,
• store the image locally,
• add a dark overlay to that image,
• add a curved title, and
• add text on top of that image below the title that adjusts to the available space.

First, we’re going to create 2 parameters to be passed in “k” will represent the keyword that we’re searching for in a Bing image search and we want Bing to find a photo that is at least 300×300 pixels and has any “Creative Commons” license.  The second parameter will be “text” which will contain the text that we want to overlay on top of the image.  You can also pass in the title of the image if you choose but we’re going to use the current date for this example. We’re going to use cURL for retrieving the image result set and the image itself and ImageMagick for manipulating changes on our image.  The Bing search parameters that I have defined below are not necessary if you’re only interested in finding any image without filtering the results.  The searchUrl variable should at least contain “https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=<QUERY HERE>“.  To narrow down the Bing query results, simply use the “Filter” option and capture the URL for your script.

Below is the script for reference and we’ll walk through it afterwards.

Let’s say that I use the keyword “deer” and example text for the query parameter “text”, here’s what it would look like with the script to the left: If you happen to see timeouts, use the following methods to extend the timeout period so the search image has enough time to download: set_time_limit(0); //PHP script timeout curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,0); // wait indefinitely curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 400); //timeout in seconds for cURL

$output = getUrl($searchUrl); preg_match_all(‘!

Next, we’re going to get the first image from the query image result and download it (feel free to change the name of the file here by updating the $imageName variable).

  preg_match_all("!.*?/!",$url,$slashMatch);
  preg_match("!".end($slashMatch[0])."(.*?.*)!",$url, $imageNameArray);
  $imageName = str_replace("+","-",$imageNameArray[1]);
  $imageNameNoExtension = substr($imageName, 0, strrpos($imageName, '.'));
  $fp = fopen(dirname(__FILE__).'/'.$imageName, "w");
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,0); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 400); //timeout in seconds
  $imageData = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  fwrite($fp, $imageData);
  fclose($fp);

The next step will resize the image to 500×500 pixels and keep the aspect ratio of the image while creating a black background color for the area outside of the scaled image (similar to the black bars on 16:9 ratio movies).  Here we’re defining today’s date as the title, we’re setting all of the text color to white, and we’re pointing to the “convert” command.  In order to accurately run the convert utility, use SSH and the command “which convert”.  Update the $convertCmd value with the result of the command.

  $dateText = date(‘F j, Y’); $theTitle = $dateText; $textColor = “white”; $convertCmd = ‘convert’;//’/usr/local/bin/convert’; $imCmd = $convertCmd.’ ‘.dirname(__FILE__).’/’.$imageName.’ -resize 500×500 -size 500×500 -frame 500×500 xc:black +swap -gravity center -write mpr:image -composite ‘.$imageName; exec($imCmd);

We will then add a dark transparency overlay on top of the image and convert the image to a PNG file so that we can retain transparency (even if the image is not a PNG file to begin with).

$imCmd = $convertCmd.’ ‘.$imageName.’ ‘; $imCmd .= ” \( -clone 0 -fill ‘#000000A0’ -alpha set -draw ‘color 0,0 reset’ \) -compose atop -composite “.$imageNameNoExtension.”.png”; exec($imCmd);

Next we’ll take the new PNG image and add the arched title with an arc of 60 degrees and with a font size of 30 pixels at the top of the image.

$imCmd = $convertCmd.’ ‘.$imageNameNoExtension.’.png -thumbnail 500×500 -write mpr:image +delete ‘; $imCmd .= ‘-pointsize 30 -fill ‘.$textColor.’ -background none label:”‘.$theTitle.'” -virtual-pixel transparent -distort arc 60 -write mpr:arc +delete ‘; $imCmd .= ‘mpr:image mpr:arc -gravity north -composite ‘.$imageNameNoExtension.’.png’; exec($imCmd);

Finally, we’ll add the text on top of the new image just below the title and we’ll have it fit the area between the title and the bottom of the image.

$imCmd = $convertCmd.’ ‘.$imageNameNoExtension.’.png -background none ‘;//-annotate +10+60 $imCmd .= ” -fill ‘”.$textColor.”‘ “; $imCmd .= “-size 480×350 -font ComicSans caption:'”.$theText.”‘ “; $imCmd .= “-gravity NorthWest -geometry +10+60 -composite “.$imageNameNoExtension.’.png’; exec($imCmd);

Now that we have a PNG created exactly how we want, all we have to do is display it inside of a HTML img tag:

echo “<img src='”.$imageNameNoExtension.”.png’>”;

So here’s my second attempt at teaching a course…  Because I’m typically a saver and deal finder as most people who know me usually ask me if there’s a better deal somewhere for what they’re looking to buy, I decided to put together a course for saving money when shopping either in retail brick & mortar stores or online at big corporate stores.  I also added a section on restaurant deals.

I figured if I’m not already on the bandwagon of teaching digital courses then I’m going to be the last one at the party without a course teaching what I know best.  Although the majority of my knowledge is around Java development or running outdoors or on a treadmill, I thought it was worthwhile to pass on my knowledge of online saving.  However, the glory days of using Mastercard Overwhelming Offers (using a program to snipe the best deals) and before Woot was purchased by Amazon when you had a better chance to get the wonderful “BOC” (Bag of Crap for us Wooters) are now over, there are still plenty of ways to save on every purchase you make online without paying full retail price.

What you’ll learn in the course are my seven ways of really saving money on deals and you always want to follow the latest deals on Dealighted.com and checking back on Amazon daily for daily deals and lightening deals.  If you can’t find something you’ll be able to use, at least you could find a really good price on something that you can re-sell for a profit!

Ok, that’s awesome but what if I want to pull down the “Agenda” items (aka: events) and display them to my own liking on my site?  Well that’s a bit difficult.  Therefore I created a new plugin called SD Google Calendar Combiner which takes multiple public Google calendars (yes, I said PUBLIC) so make sure your calendars are public before trying to use the plugin and see a working list of combined calendars.  What this plugin allows me to do is to make a RESTful call to the new Wordpress 4.4 REST API with all events from multiple calendars on one feed that I can make with one simple GET call.  Pretty cool, huh?  Also, I created a shortcode, like [sd_show_calendar id=”171″] that can easily be inserted into any Wordpress post or page to display an agenda-like list of events in order by dates from the current date to the number of days in advance that you’re interested in viewing.

So I know it’s not the complete end-all be-all plugin for calendars but it solves a lot of issues in displaying combined calendars on your Wordpress blog or site.  If you would like to contribute to the plugin or have any questions about using it, I’ll be happy to answer them and would appreciate the help in maintaining the plugin.  Also, if you have any ideas for using the plugin that you’d like to share, please feel free to comment below or send me an email!  Thanks for reading this far and I hope you enjoyed the short and sweet video!

I’ve listed it as an open-source project on GitHub so please feel free to fork it and offer suggestions!