What are the potential pitfalls of merging images in PHP and how can they be avoided?

One potential pitfall of merging images in PHP is the loss of image quality due to compression. This can be avoided by using the appropriate image manipulation functions in PHP that preserve image quality, such as the imagecopyresampled function.

$baseImage = imagecreatefromjpeg('base.jpg');
$overlayImage = imagecreatefrompng('overlay.png');

imagecopyresampled($baseImage, $overlayImage, 0, 0, 0, 0, imagesx($overlayImage), imagesy($overlayImage), imagesx($overlayImage), imagesy($overlayImage));

imagejpeg($baseImage, 'merged.jpg');

imagedestroy($baseImage);
imagedestroy($overlayImage);