In my proposal I suggested creating ImageMagick class for editing photos as faster than GD class. I had experience with ImageMagick and I was pretty sure that difference between GD and ImageMagick is huge.
Surprisingly I did some investigation and it turned out that difference is not so big.
Performance data:
GD Rotate: 3.3215408325195
GD Resize: 8.8823390007019
GD Crop: 3.3448140621185
Imagemagick Rotate: 7.4195408821106
Imagemagick Resize: 7.741574048996
Imagemagick Crop: 2.1027619838715
Each operation(rotate, resize, crop) was executed 100 times.
So now I’m not sure it’s essential to create that class. Bigger performance difference could be encountered with image effects because ImageMagick has some of them built-in whereas in GD I will have to do it in PHP, but image effects is a minor functionality.