Show HN: RESTful API for images, documents, & video

Hey everyone,

Over the last 5 years I’ve been developing across AR/VR, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning and Web. I work in a solid team, but this stuff is hard. I keep finding myself in situations where dealing with images, videos, and 3d content is an absolute pain (setting up the libraries or to try and work between them). I was doing a lot of reflection last year and I came up with an idea that could make this easier:

Imagine taking the Adobe and Autodesk products and shaking them until all their building blocks fall out. Now collect all the similar blocks together and offer them as a REST API.

REST might not be the best choice. We did a big project in gRPC. It has a lot of benefits but isn’t as widely used so I was concerned about the adoption and learning curve. But REST is just so simple to use across Python, JavaScript, C/C++/C# or whatever language/platform you find yourself in.

It also makes a lot of sense to me to do the processing off-device. I know some really good 3d designers that aren’t making any art right now because their computer died and they can’t afford/justify a new one. For AR/VR I can see things moving to off-device computation that is streamed back over high speed connection to reduce power consumption, reduce heat generation, and enable smaller form factors. But this doesn’t necessarily mean over the internet. I can definitely see a local server running the API for speed/security.

There are other APIs for images and videos, like Cloudinary, Imgix, Imagekit, Sirv… etc but these are focused on CDN. I’m talking about a mega API for images & videos that has all the powerful Machine Learning operations (remove background, upscale...etc) and all the basic operations (crop, compress, convert, resize, filters...etc).

I wanted to start with images & videos but I’m excited to get back to 3d. Boolean operations have always been a massive pain for me in 3d but also super super useful in a bunch of use cases. We really loved OpenVDB for this, but then you're stuck in C++ land. I would have totally used a simple REST API to do that, along with other computational geometry tasks like extrusion, revolution...etc

I’m not saying this is going to be the most optimal way. It is always going to be lower latency to do it on device. But rapidly prototyping an application, getting it out to users, and validating your startup is incredibly valuable. Teams just can’t afford to burn engineering cycles on this stuff, but I want people to make rich media applications!

So, today we’re launching the Massless Media API on Product Hunt. I would super appreciate your support on PH. But more importantly, I would love to hear what HN thinks, and if this API can help you in any way.