Figmage: I don't mess with images (2020)

Hey HN, I built Figmage as a Figma plugin because I was super frustrated with managing images and creating image assets every time I wrote a blog post.

Figma is a great tool to design and manipulate images from cropping, resizing, adding annotations, and making cover graphics, and you can export them. So Figmage gives a shareable link to your designs that live in Figma.

Updating your design in Figma, and publishing, will update the images everywhere they're referenced. That means no re-uploads, and re-deploys.

Can you serve images directly from S3 static website hosting? You’ll avoid any cold start (and Lambda costs) that way. You could also put CloudFront or Cloudflare in front for caching after the first request.

I greatly sympathize with the author's dislike of dealing with images. I'm still waiting for an inexpensive image hosting & manipulation service that I can push images to at massive scale, get N variation images back (from a source image) along with links for the images to then be placed within my service (along with some primitive image transformation options, nothing too fancy).

I absolutely hate dealing with hosting and managing images for services I build. I've yet to find anything remotely cost-practical that rides on top of eg AWS or the equivalent and just provides a simple thin layer service so I never have to store or manipulate images again. Take AWS, add a modest margin on top for the image management & manipulation layer. I've been waiting for someone to do this for 10-15 years at this point. Perhaps either there's no great business there (not enough potential customers interested in having image hosting managed away), or everybody else hates dealing with image hosting too.

Companies like Cloudinary offer such services, and their prices are obscene (eg $100/month for 225gb of bandwidth and storage).

At some point I'm going to just have to build it myself, get into the image-hosting-as-a-service business because I hate image hosting so much.

I made an open-source service [1] that does the same thing earlier this year. Although it's pitched for OpenGraph images (where I share OP's pain when dealing with blog post assets), it works for any kind of image, by proxying the Figma API that renders a frame to an image and returns an S3 public URL.

[1] https://usefoggy.vercel.app

Great idea. Bought immediately, this has always been a pain for me

Great idea! I wish I could provide an imgix api key and use it with this, because we need to use our own CDN for images. But this would take a lot of hassle out!

Whoa, this is brilliant and solves a very real problem.

Excellent idea! I purchased the lifetime tier :)