Image manipulation on the fly + CDN = awesome | Hacker News Reader

Image manipulation on the fly + CDN = awesome

cdnimag.es

23 pointsroachsocal10 comments

We had been using this on a few of our side projects for a while now (since Amazon introduced custom origin servers on Cloudfront) and figured maybe it was something others would find useful. The systems is modeled after a similar system we used at Yahoo. Right now we're not charging or anything, just want to see if people find it useful before we expand. Let us know if you have any questions or have other features you'd like to see added.

First question would be about how much can I trust this. ie.: would you open source it and provide it as a paying service at the same time (like, say, wordpress). That's the surest way for me to trust any type of infrastructure, ie. if you guys dissapoint or dissapear with the hosted service, I can run it myself.

Second: how helpful is something like this really? Can you give some example use cases?

Right now we're hosting it because it makes setup / integration time very quick. We're considering going open source for those who want to setup a box to do this yourself.

Here's an example of how we use it: We push original high resolution versions of photos/graphics to S3. Then to make a page with smaller, cropped thumbnails, it's as easy as calling for the image through Cloudfront with a special cdnimag.es url. (example integation: http://www.seewhatiwore.com/browse)

You'll notice with a site like Flickr, they generate five fixed sizes and they are locked into those sizes across their site. (example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappensuncle/183689226/sizes/l/...)

With cdnimag.es you can generate variations of the original image (sizes, crops, grayscale, reflection) on the fly without doing anything to the original. All this while still enjoying the caching and performance benefits of a CDN like Cloudfront.

Would this service support direct uploads to S3?

Yes. Currently our API supports pushing images to your S3 account (http://cdnimag.es/#anc_20). You can also use our clients for quicker integration (https://github.com/traviskuhl/cdnimages-clients/. currently only PHP, but we have a Perl & Ruby client coming soon)

Look at your inbox.

Cirruxcache [1] recently added the same capabilities. It's open-source and piggy-backs on Google App Engine - double awesome.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/cirruxcache/

Guys, seriously get rid of the grey on grey on grey action. Your site is nearly unreadable. I recommend you talk to @limedaring, she's a remarkable designer, was my cofounder, and has done great work for several YC companies.

that's what happens when you let developers do design. definitely plan to bring on a designer for the next version of the site.

interesting . . . I was thinking of a similar idea last year, using nginx's image filter module (libgd) http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpImageFilterModule

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