Symphony.

jquery image galery galeria resizes its images and thumbnails with css by default. Assuming the thumbnails are small, and the presented images are 110% the size of what they are resized to; Would it be faster to use css, as compared to use php (symphony image function) to resize images, and create thumbnails...

One extra call to the server for a thumbnail VS the users browser resizing the image with css...what would be the fastest?

I do know that IE doesn't display re sized images very well unless you use a bit of a hack. Because of that, I usually don't like the browser resizing my images. They just look bad in IE.

Symphony will cache the re sized images once they are created, so the only extra overhead would be added server calls to get thumbnail image. I guess you could have CSS re size the large images for the thumbnails, but then you'd have the browser download all of the full-sized images just to show thumbs. I think this would be slow for the end user to have to wait on that. It kind-of defeats the purpose of thumbnails, in my opinion. Also, if the gallery software was truly Ajax-like, it would only request the large image if it needed it, so multiple versions of an image really shouldn't add to the overhead.

I try to split the difference by having 2 images, one full-sized and one thumbnail (the largest I need), then if I ever need a third or fourth thumbnail I just have the browser adjust it down. Once the image is small enough, the IE jaggieness aren't so obvious (or you can use the hack above to fix it).

So, with Symphony, I'd have it re size the large image and a thumbnail. I wouldn't use full-sized images as thumbs. That seems like a lot of wasted bandwidth and download time.

For the record you can fix the issue with CSS:

img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }

You can read the explanation here: http://css-tricks.com/ie-fix-bicubic-scaling-for-images/