Automated resizing of JPEG image + making slices?

[Michiel Sikma]

Hello everybody.

I'm currently involved in a site building project in which we're  
going to use the Google Maps API. The user will be able to browse the  
site by looking over a really large image, similar to how Google Maps  
itself works, except with the design of the site on the background  
rather than a map of the world.

I initially hired someone to do it in PHP (don't bite, please :-) but  
it seems that I forgot about one thing: the people updating the site  
would have been able to upload a huge 30 MB JPEG image, which PHP  
would then resize to various sizes and cut them into 200x200 pieces,  
which would be fed to the Google Maps API. However, this costs a lot  
of memory, and PHP by default only has 8 MB.

The programmer offered to do a C++ image manipulator, but he uses  
Windows and the people who update the site use Mac OS X. It would be  
tedious. Then I thought that Python might solve me the head-ache.

I know some Python (but not much since I've never actually written  
that many things in it), and with some effort I could probably make a  
simple image manipulator frontend in it, but only if I can find a  
good library for doing the actual manipulation. Do any of you know  
such libraries?

Many thanks,

Michiel Sikma
michiel at thingmajig.org