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. 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.