I didn't expect this to get so much attention or I'd have written some context. I came across this while researching solutions to the old thumbnails problem. It

I didn't expect this to get so much attention or I'd have written some context. I came across this while researching solutions to the old thumbnails problem. It doesn't look like it took off or is maintained but I thought it was interesting. Image resizing is a hard problem. At a place I used to work at we wrote a custom distributed image thumbnail generation system for user supplied images. It was pretty complex and used a database and pub/sub message queueing to propagate changes from a SAN file system. The main issue was that the underlying image libraries weren't suited to running on a web server. It leaked memory like mad. This resulted in layers of sophisticated monitoring and automatic restart systems being built on top. It shouldn't have to be this hard. If a progressive format like JPEG2000 or WebP takes off then browsers can just download enough data to fill whatever pixels they need to fill. I have a lot of other thoughts on this but they can wait for a blog post. If anyone is interested?