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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Why is it such a great idea?

Wouldn't it be easier/quicker to either:

a) Have a command-line tool to resize images? Alternatively, one that's integrated into the shell so that you can access it from context menus? I.e. right-click -> "resize image"

b) Just open it in mspaint or your open-source image editor of choice?

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These services are becoming more interesting as responsive web design takes off and everyone tries to format their images based on client agent needs. Often the exact dimensions and treatment of the image can't be determined before request time depending on the user agent's screen size, resolution etc. Also, why spend time as a designer cropping and scaling images when you can automate it all and make it on demand?

This thread caught by eye since I have been working on the very same idea for the last year. http://www.pixtulate.com

It's simpler to store the original image, then generate URLs like http://image-server.com/resize?url=http://s3.com/original.jp...

This lets you change the size of thumbnails by only changing the URLs.

I've been doing it for years, works great.

Doesn't this mean that the server needs to manually process the image on each request?

You should stick a CDN in front so this doesn't happen. Ideally once the server generates the image, it would also be cached there.

You probably want nginx in front of pillbox. Nginx setup as a basic http proxy cache.

So, CDN -> nginx -> pillbox.

This is because CDNs can send lots of concurrent requests to the origin server if lots of people are requesting the same new image simultaneously.

Pretty sure the idea is to make this available as a service, for UGC-type sites.

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