[mffowler]

I just loaded the updated version, but it really didn't fix the speed issue. Took about 10 seconds (sometimes up to 20) to open a product page from a subcategories menu. Also, the mod doesn't really work well with variants. I also tried generating the html catalog as a work around but that didn't work for me as the images didn't generate correctly and catalog pages had no images. I could try and fix that, but am not really interested in html catalog generation every day.

Example: If you have color and size variations set for a product and have images set for all variants as X-Cart does and display a variant thumbnail under the main image (using this mod's option), you get an image for every variant (size and color). That's basically multiple rows of the same image...

I really like how GD Library sizes and scales the images as well as the Unsharp Mask, but I feel that there are a lot of complex things going on with product images especially variants - and I doubt all of these issues can be fully implemented and fixed. The theory of the mod is great, but it may be premature. Saying that, I have a site with no variant images and it works great!

So, I would recommend this mod for someone who just wants to sell products that are not a variant nature. I don't recommened it (at this time) for anyone with product variant images. As for the popularity of this and related threads associated with auto-generated product images, it is a trend in the majority of e-commerce cart packages and it would be nice for X-Cart to create this add-on that is tightly integrated with their core code and taks advantage of all the developments that we have seen in the 4.1.x lineup.

Back to using my own batch image processing and resize/Unsharp Mask scripts.

- Mike