Image Thumbnails (TimThumb) Help

Overview

TimThumb is an image-resize script first developed for Mimbo Pro, and now used in all our themes. It has grown to be massively popular and is now used in WordPress themes and plugins around the world. Check out the TimThumb Project Page, which has a variety of documentation and demos for you to see the full features.

Image Formats

TimThumb supports the following web image formats. Whilst there are other image types shese are the only formats that should be used on websites as they are the only ones that are guaranteed to be supported across all browsers and operating systems.

  • .jpg
  • .png
  • .gif

Notes

  1. Images on external domain can not always be resized. They will only work on websites like flickr, picasa, and youtube
  2. The thumbnails crop from the middle outwards, so make sure the images are evenly shaped. Tall thin images, or short wide images will likely end up looking bad.
  3. Elemental (and so it’s child themes) include a WordPress shortcode to make use of TimThumb in your post content.

Troubleshooting

  • When used in Mimbo Pro, the /scripts/cache folder needs to be given the permissions 777 in order to save the cache files. This speeds up the image-serving which keeps your server happy.
  • In Elemental, the /tools/cache/ folder needs to be given the permissions 777 in order to save the cache files.
  • If you are receiving a 404 error then make sure that the only directory that has 777 permissions are the cache and temp directories. If any of the directories that they are in have 777 permissions then there’s a good chance the images won’t display
  • On some server setups, the .htaccess file found in the /scripts/ folder can cause problems. If this happens, deleting the .htaccess file should help. Make sure to try all the other suggestions first.
  • Make sure that the photos being resized are on your domain. If you use images from another website then they will not be loaded.

For more detailed TimThumb troubleshooting tips read this post on BinaryMoon.co.uk.

Please note that these tips change regularly as TimThumb evolves. We aim to keep things backwards-compatible but in general you should try to keep things as up to date as possible.