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Show HN: Simple image resizing/optimization service

171 points by hoahluke 10y ago

hoahluke 10y ago
I made this mainly because I wanted a service to use for my own projects - but the existing solutions were either prohibitively expensive or didn't have uptime guarantees. The backend for the processing service is nodejs and sharp[1], processed images are cached on CloudFlare. The processing servers are a custom instance type in an autoscaling group on Google Cloud. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! [1] https://github.com/lovell/sharp https://github.com/lovell/sharp
- VeejayRampay 10y ago
  Note that sharp uses libvips which happens to be LGPL. I was wondering if this is an issue for commercial products (IANAL).
  - anc84 10y ago
    LGPL is very lenient and especially meant to ease use in/at commercial products.
- adityapatadia 10y ago
  Cloudflare does not permit storing just images in any of their plans. Their terms state that serving disproportionate amount of image or video via their service will be violation of their terms. You should check it before using it for longh term or providing cheaper cache options to users.
  - hoahluke 10y ago
    Ah, great info - thanks for the heads up. I'll dig into that and look into alternatives
    - adityapatadia 10y ago
      @Jimaek commented similar thing. If some big site starts using your service, your promise of unlimited bandwidth can fall flat. Just be cautious and read terms carefully I would say.
    - jgrahamc 10y ago
      Instead of looking for an alternative, why not get in contact with Cloudflare and talk to us about it?
      - hoahluke 10y ago
        I definitely will do that!
- sfeng 10y ago
  Often when competitors are expensive it's for a reason. Occasionally you'll have stumbled onto an old industry where tech can disrupt things and lower costs, but for cloud-based image serving, everyone is essentially using the same tools and CDNs. You should have a really good reason why you will be able to deliver at a lower cost or with lower margins, otherwise it's likely you will have to end up with the same 'prohibitively expensive' rates, or will go out of business.
- callmeed 10y ago
  Well, from first glance, you're lowest plan is more expensive than imgix's $10/mo minimum. I see now that you have a free plan and I get that you're following the SaaS pricing plan status quo, but if you claim to be a lower-cost competitor, you should make the free plan more prominent. I have a lot of media-heavy side projects. I use Cloudinary for 1 and imgix for the rest. It's really hard to compare you price-wise to imgix because you are charging based differently. One thing I like about imgix is that I can give them access to an S3 bucket and perform transformations on master images that aren't public-read.
dk8996 10y ago
Looks nice. Is the service smart enough to figure out the file type, for example, image from facebook https://scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_820336851353851_664651990019563840_o.jpg?oh=a75345663d781526e8d8135c3a057e2c&oe=590FFF2F https://scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_82...
- hoahluke 10y ago
  Thanks! And yes, it doesn't pay any attention to the original filename, image format is detected by the data stream. Here's that image resized to 600px wide: https://i.scaley.io/600-max-https/scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_820336851353851_664651990019563840_o.jpg?oh=a75345663d781526e8d8135c3a057e2c&oe=590FFF2F https://i.scaley.io/600-max-https/scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn...
GoToRO 10y ago
Maybe you could implement Rotate from EXIF data.
niklasrde 10y ago
100% Uptime Guarantee? I'd like to see a status page with some stats and maybe simple graphs akin to https://status.github.com/ https://status.github.com/.
- SnaKeZ 10y ago
  They uses Cloudflare for image caching so it's the Cloudflare uptime. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - hoahluke 10y ago
    Cloudflare actually doesn't have any uptime guarantees until you're on the enterprise plan, afaik. If Cloudflare were to have an outage which caused downtime of Scaley then the guarantee would cover that outage.
ferrantim 10y ago
Very cool! How is this different from some of the alternatives like Filestack https://www.filestack.com/ https://www.filestack.com/. I'm not trolling, genuinely curious.
- hoahluke 10y ago
  The main thing I've tried to focus on is simplicity - you can just use it by changing some URLs. There are definitely other services out there which address the same thing, the closest one is probably https://rsz.io/ https://rsz.io/ which even includes some more processing features, but it doesn't have the CDN and I couldn't find any info about uptime.
jastanton 10y ago
Fun feature you should add: the ability to crop around faces. I.e say you have a long and tall image and you need it to be square, you could pick the center, top, or bottom to zoom in on, which do you choose? It would be nice to set a flag and say "find the subject(s) of this photo and crop around the subject(s)".
- stachenfeld 10y ago
  Yeah, that is a good idea. The Google Vision API actually makes it pretty easy to do. It is pretty amazing that this kind of thing is now possible. You can chain together a bunch of transformations into one like [find face] + [crop photo]. Here's one example of that implemented https://www.filestack.com/docs/image-transformations/facial-detection https://www.filestack.com/docs/image-transformations/facial-...
kejaed 10y ago
Pretty slick. Have any signups yet?
jimaek 10y ago
CloudFlare doesn't allow this kind of use of their service. Once you start pushing enough bandwidth they will ask you to go away. And since you offer free unlimited CDN bandwidth, when that happens and you move to a different CDN provider your bill could increase 50 times over a day.
- igordebatur 10y ago
  Agree on this. In the beginning, we wanted to use CloudFlare for https://uploadcare.com https://uploadcare.com (we're not a direct competitor, but provide image transformations as a part of our services). But it's against their policies, they confirmed it. The only option is to use a proper CDN. A disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Uploadcare.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  That is really good to know about Cloudflare. CDN cost an important thing for anyone to take into consideration when they price their free/paid tiers and something that not everyone does. I always try to price fee tiers so that one paid customer pays for about 100 or more free users and aim for at least 5% conversion of free to paid. It's not a hard-fast rule but a good starting point. If I can't hit that (even after crippling the free tier) I just drop the free tier altogether and make it a free trial instead.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  It's not bandwidth that is restricted by our terms of service it's... SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING You acknowledge that Cloudflare’s Service is offered as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote storage. Accordingly, you understand and agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Cloudflare’s Service is also a shared web caching service, which means a number of customers’ websites are cached from the same server. To ensure that Cloudflare’s Service is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer’s usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers’ sites. Additionally, the purpose of Cloudflare’s Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. You further agree that if, at Cloudflare’s sole discretion, you are deemed to have violated this section, or if Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you.
leni536 10y ago
My acid test for image scaling software: http://i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png http://i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png This means that you don't use a linear color space for blending colors. Sorry about the language, the image is not made by me [1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120904060524/http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120904060524/http://www.4p8.co... edit: I see that your backend relies on libvips to do the resizing. I have no experience with it, but I could make libvips-tools' vipsthumbnail program work correctly: $ vipsthumbnail --linear -f tn_%s.png -s 256x128 gamma-1.0-or-2.2.png Note the "--linear" option, without it produces the same wrong image.
- hoahluke 10y ago
  I didn't think this would come up so quickly! This can actually be fixed with an undocumented option 'gamma'[1] I didn't include it in the website, admittedly because I didn't fully understand it, and I wanted to keep the service as simple as possible. Would it make sense for this to be the default? [1] https://i.scaley.io/png-gamma-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-gamma-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.pn...
  - leni536 10y ago
    Nice! I think it should be the default. Some software might treats as a compromise between correctness and cost (doing the rescaling in linear space is usually more costly). In my view it should be correctness first. The ImageWorsener's website as an excellent reading material on image resizing and other transformations. ImageWorsener is a "correctness first" image resizing software. http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/ http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/
    - hoahluke 10y ago
      Thanks for your detailed feedback on this, I appreciate it!
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
hashkb 10y ago
Looks really well done! Can someone compare/contrast with Imgix?
aarondf 10y ago
This looks like a great service, but the 3x, 5x, and 10x refunds make me very very nervous for you. 100% uptime is practically impossible. Good luck!
- tobyhinloopen 10y ago
  Its based on the time being down, not rounded up to a month. Downtime of an hour equals a dollar or something
  - aarondf 10y ago
    Oh that makes me feel better. Makes sense too
donut 10y ago
Nice features and presentation. Looks great. But those aren't URLs. Do you document how images are retrieved, http or https?
pag 10y ago
Related: https://transloadit.com/ https://transloadit.com/
- markplindsay 10y ago
  Transloadit is great. I'm using it right now with an open-source video project (https://github.com/xiaofei-mo/mysteriousobjectsatnoon https://github.com/xiaofei-mo/mysteriousobjectsatnoon). The encoding process is just ffmpeg under the hood, but not having to write all of the glue code to get it running with AWS has saved me a ton of time.
  - kvz 10y ago
    Thanks! Transloadit founder here - just wanted to say if there's anything you feel we could do better we'd love to hear that too :+1:
samblr 10y ago
Neat. what stack are you using ? Something similar for those on GCP : https://goo.gl/dU0aKy https://goo.gl/dU0aKy
mpweiher 10y ago
I have to admit that I don't quite understand "image scaling as a service". Scaling is almost certainly a case where shipping the image over a network is significantly more costly than just doing the scaling locally?
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Here the only binary program you need installed to scale the image is curl. If you want to do it yourself, you need a whole bunch of image processing libraries installed. Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway. Then you're back to where you started, making an http call to an external service. Unless latency is a critical factor, an image scaling API is attractive because you do not need to waste development time setting up (and scaling) your own image processing environment.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    In this case you also don't have to store the images.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    > Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway Not everyone is obsessed with microservices.
traviswingo 10y ago
Awesome work! I have a suggestion/question. Why did you chose the pattern /:options/:image over /:image/:options ? Seems the latter would be more user friendly.
- rayboy1995 10y ago
  If the image url is in front there isn't exactly a sure fire way to tell where that url ends and where the options should begin. Of course there are work arounds, but the way it is now it seems that it would cover every case.
  - traviswingo 10y ago
    Good point. Didn't think of that.
jimaek 10y ago
btw I am interested in all kinds of web performance optimization services including image hosting. If anyone is interested to partner up email me at dak@prospectone.io
- pdimitar 10y ago
  Could you clarify a little? What do you mean you're interested? You're founding a business and need a technical co-founder? You're a dev founding a business and need a technical partner? You're a dev looking for work in that area? Might be my English (not a native speaker) but your message isn't clear.
tonmoy 10y ago
This is the tester/hacker in me talking, but have you checked for cases where one can loop your own images hundreds of times? (e.g. https://i.scaley.io/jpg/i.scaley.io/png/i.imgur.com/DZjrx4E.jpg https://i.scaley.io/jpg/i.scaley.io/png/i.imgur.com/DZjrx4E.... but more than 2 times) A simple url DOS attack from my puny browser may cripple your entire server.
acdha 10y ago
Have you considered implementing IIIF? That's an emerging standard for constructing image URLs which has a growing amount of existing client support: http://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/ http://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/
inka 10y ago
Now I'm kicking myself because I did something very similar for one of my clients based on AWS and shared it publicly (https://github.com/pbudzon/aws-image-gateway https://github.com/pbudzon/aws-image-gateway)! Not sure how it compares cost-wise, though. It's a combination of CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda and S3. I'm quite sure CloudFront doesn't have limitations on what you can cache, like Cloudflare seems to have. Like others who commented, I don't get the idea of image-resize-as-a-service, so I remember I laughed at my client when they asked me for this. For some reason I believe it's better for the world if we don't make people think it's ok to throw around gigantic images around the cables when it's completely unnecessary...
- codegeek 10y ago
  Not your fault. Developers tend to sometimes underestimate the power of releasing a command line utility as a web based/API tool that can help non techies do simple stuff. Image resizing is a recurring candidate but there are others like conversion tools (to pdf), checkers/monitors (ssl for example) etc. Yes, you could do these on your server with a simple cmd line but tons of folks are willing to pay to be able to use a browser/API to do the same.
  - bcjordan 10y ago
    It feels like a compelling property here is to have a "single point of continuously increasing quality"—that is, one changing chunk of code that is continuously improved and battle tested as more and more users report issues that require workarounds. (But of course ever-changing externally hosted web services like these have their drawbacks.)
karim79 10y ago
Related: https://kraken.io https://kraken.io
- devy 10y ago
  I wonder how is scaley comparing to kraken? I have used neither. Would love to hear others' experiences.
0XAFFE 10y ago
As so often: Please don't show a blank page when no javascript is available. Maybe a message that you should enable javascript or better some basic information what your service does.
time4tea 10y ago
https://github.com/springernature/immagine https://github.com/springernature/immagine If you want to host it yourself...
artursapek 10y ago
<snark>For something called "scaley" your logo looks very blurry on my high-dpi display. Use SVG!</snark>
nodesocket 10y ago
I'd like to echo the sentiment that offering 100% uptime and 3x, 5x, 10x refunds is a dangerous decision and actually will not increase paid signups. I've been doing operations/DevOps for over a decade (in fact I just launched a consulting startup (https://elasticbyte.net https://elasticbyte.net) that helps companies manage their cloud infrastructure). 100% uptime is a red flag, ops professionals never guarantee 100%. You instead should offer standard 99.9% (44 mins a month) or 99.99% (4 min 30 sec) with standard SLA language.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Theoretically, I could sign up then DoS the site myself for a nice payout.
mgottein 10y ago
As someone who has never hosted an image service like this, what actions do you have to take to stop "bad" people from using your service? For example, uploading inappropriate / illegal / violent images.
- stdio_h 10y ago
  I developed a website for the university I attend that anyone can upload photographs of older exams for each course. In order to solve the image content problem the system checks every uploaded image with a 3rd party image recognition API[1] before saving it. Works pretty good so far! [1]https://clarifai.com/ https://clarifai.com/
dbbk 10y ago
How does this differ from Imgix?
franciscop 10y ago
I wonder if any thought was put into waifu [1]. While in western countries there is not such a big usercase, I know in Asia a good upscaling algorithm for manga would be really popular. [1] http://waifu2x.udp.jp/ http://waifu2x.udp.jp/
johnflan 10y ago
sudo apt-get install imagemagick?
mderazon 10y ago
My problem is usually making the cropping "smart". I need a content-aware cropping so that the resulting image looks good. It doesn't seem to come up too often as a known and requested feature in most of these services, I am wondering how come, this seems like a "must have" for me
fiatjaf 10y ago
It can't be open like that "just use our URL" because it will bring many free-riders and shutdown your server. But it also can't be a closed system with private keys and all that, because the hassle is too enormous -- the user will need a server to get the key for each image and so on. I have the impression that all services of this kind suffer from the above dual-problem.

171 points by hoahluke 10y ago

I made this mainly because I wanted a service to use for my own projects - but the existing solutions were either prohibitively expensive or didn't have uptime guarantees. The backend for the processing service is nodejs and sharp[1], processed images are cached on CloudFlare. The processing servers are a custom instance type in an autoscaling group on Google Cloud. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! [1] https://github.com/lovell/sharp https://github.com/lovell/sharp

VeejayRampay 10y ago
Note that sharp uses libvips which happens to be LGPL. I was wondering if this is an issue for commercial products (IANAL).
- anc84 10y ago
  LGPL is very lenient and especially meant to ease use in/at commercial products.
adityapatadia 10y ago
Cloudflare does not permit storing just images in any of their plans. Their terms state that serving disproportionate amount of image or video via their service will be violation of their terms. You should check it before using it for longh term or providing cheaper cache options to users.
- hoahluke 10y ago
  Ah, great info - thanks for the heads up. I'll dig into that and look into alternatives
  - adityapatadia 10y ago
    @Jimaek commented similar thing. If some big site starts using your service, your promise of unlimited bandwidth can fall flat. Just be cautious and read terms carefully I would say.
  - jgrahamc 10y ago
    Instead of looking for an alternative, why not get in contact with Cloudflare and talk to us about it?
    - hoahluke 10y ago
      I definitely will do that!
sfeng 10y ago
Often when competitors are expensive it's for a reason. Occasionally you'll have stumbled onto an old industry where tech can disrupt things and lower costs, but for cloud-based image serving, everyone is essentially using the same tools and CDNs. You should have a really good reason why you will be able to deliver at a lower cost or with lower margins, otherwise it's likely you will have to end up with the same 'prohibitively expensive' rates, or will go out of business.
callmeed 10y ago
Well, from first glance, you're lowest plan is more expensive than imgix's $10/mo minimum. I see now that you have a free plan and I get that you're following the SaaS pricing plan status quo, but if you claim to be a lower-cost competitor, you should make the free plan more prominent. I have a lot of media-heavy side projects. I use Cloudinary for 1 and imgix for the rest. It's really hard to compare you price-wise to imgix because you are charging based differently. One thing I like about imgix is that I can give them access to an S3 bucket and perform transformations on master images that aren't public-read.

dk8996 10y ago

Looks nice. Is the service smart enough to figure out the file type, for example, image from facebook https://scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_820336851353851_664651990019563840_o.jpg?oh=a75345663d781526e8d8135c3a057e2c&oe=590FFF2F https://scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_82...

hoahluke 10y ago
Thanks! And yes, it doesn't pay any attention to the original filename, image format is detected by the data stream. Here's that image resized to 600px wide: https://i.scaley.io/600-max-https/scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/11206479_820336851353851_664651990019563840_o.jpg?oh=a75345663d781526e8d8135c3a057e2c&oe=590FFF2F https://i.scaley.io/600-max-https/scontent.fbed1-2.fna.fbcdn...

GoToRO 10y ago

Maybe you could implement Rotate from EXIF data.

niklasrde 10y ago

100% Uptime Guarantee? I'd like to see a status page with some stats and maybe simple graphs akin to https://status.github.com/ https://status.github.com/.

SnaKeZ 10y ago
They uses Cloudflare for image caching so it's the Cloudflare uptime. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- hoahluke 10y ago
  Cloudflare actually doesn't have any uptime guarantees until you're on the enterprise plan, afaik. If Cloudflare were to have an outage which caused downtime of Scaley then the guarantee would cover that outage.

ferrantim 10y ago

Very cool! How is this different from some of the alternatives like Filestack https://www.filestack.com/ https://www.filestack.com/. I'm not trolling, genuinely curious.

hoahluke 10y ago
The main thing I've tried to focus on is simplicity - you can just use it by changing some URLs. There are definitely other services out there which address the same thing, the closest one is probably https://rsz.io/ https://rsz.io/ which even includes some more processing features, but it doesn't have the CDN and I couldn't find any info about uptime.

jastanton 10y ago

Fun feature you should add: the ability to crop around faces. I.e say you have a long and tall image and you need it to be square, you could pick the center, top, or bottom to zoom in on, which do you choose? It would be nice to set a flag and say "find the subject(s) of this photo and crop around the subject(s)".

stachenfeld 10y ago
Yeah, that is a good idea. The Google Vision API actually makes it pretty easy to do. It is pretty amazing that this kind of thing is now possible. You can chain together a bunch of transformations into one like [find face] + [crop photo]. Here's one example of that implemented https://www.filestack.com/docs/image-transformations/facial-detection https://www.filestack.com/docs/image-transformations/facial-...

kejaed 10y ago

Pretty slick. Have any signups yet?

jimaek 10y ago

CloudFlare doesn't allow this kind of use of their service. Once you start pushing enough bandwidth they will ask you to go away. And since you offer free unlimited CDN bandwidth, when that happens and you move to a different CDN provider your bill could increase 50 times over a day.

igordebatur 10y ago
Agree on this. In the beginning, we wanted to use CloudFlare for https://uploadcare.com https://uploadcare.com (we're not a direct competitor, but provide image transformations as a part of our services). But it's against their policies, they confirmed it. The only option is to use a proper CDN. A disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Uploadcare.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
That is really good to know about Cloudflare. CDN cost an important thing for anyone to take into consideration when they price their free/paid tiers and something that not everyone does. I always try to price fee tiers so that one paid customer pays for about 100 or more free users and aim for at least 5% conversion of free to paid. It's not a hard-fast rule but a good starting point. If I can't hit that (even after crippling the free tier) I just drop the free tier altogether and make it a free trial instead.
jgrahamc 10y ago
It's not bandwidth that is restricted by our terms of service it's... SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING You acknowledge that Cloudflare’s Service is offered as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote storage. Accordingly, you understand and agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Cloudflare’s Service is also a shared web caching service, which means a number of customers’ websites are cached from the same server. To ensure that Cloudflare’s Service is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer’s usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers’ sites. Additionally, the purpose of Cloudflare’s Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. You further agree that if, at Cloudflare’s sole discretion, you are deemed to have violated this section, or if Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you.

leni536 10y ago

My acid test for image scaling software: http://i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png http://i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png This means that you don't use a linear color space for blending colors. Sorry about the language, the image is not made by me [1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120904060524/http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120904060524/http://www.4p8.co... edit: I see that your backend relies on libvips to do the resizing. I have no experience with it, but I could make libvips-tools' vipsthumbnail program work correctly: $ vipsthumbnail --linear -f tn_%s.png -s 256x128 gamma-1.0-or-2.2.png Note the "--linear" option, without it produces the same wrong image.

hoahluke 10y ago
I didn't think this would come up so quickly! This can actually be fixed with an undocumented option 'gamma'[1] I didn't include it in the website, admittedly because I didn't fully understand it, and I wanted to keep the service as simple as possible. Would it make sense for this to be the default? [1] https://i.scaley.io/png-gamma-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.png https://i.scaley.io/png-gamma-256x128/i.imgur.com/X9vKa2s.pn...
- leni536 10y ago
  Nice! I think it should be the default. Some software might treats as a compromise between correctness and cost (doing the rescaling in linear space is usually more costly). In my view it should be correctness first. The ImageWorsener's website as an excellent reading material on image resizing and other transformations. ImageWorsener is a "correctness first" image resizing software. http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/ http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/
  - hoahluke 10y ago
    Thanks for your detailed feedback on this, I appreciate it!
  - zzzcpan 10y ago

hashkb 10y ago

Looks really well done! Can someone compare/contrast with Imgix?

aarondf 10y ago

This looks like a great service, but the 3x, 5x, and 10x refunds make me very very nervous for you. 100% uptime is practically impossible. Good luck!

tobyhinloopen 10y ago
Its based on the time being down, not rounded up to a month. Downtime of an hour equals a dollar or something
- aarondf 10y ago
  Oh that makes me feel better. Makes sense too

donut 10y ago

Nice features and presentation. Looks great. But those aren't URLs. Do you document how images are retrieved, http or https?

pag 10y ago

Related: https://transloadit.com/ https://transloadit.com/

markplindsay 10y ago
Transloadit is great. I'm using it right now with an open-source video project (https://github.com/xiaofei-mo/mysteriousobjectsatnoon https://github.com/xiaofei-mo/mysteriousobjectsatnoon). The encoding process is just ffmpeg under the hood, but not having to write all of the glue code to get it running with AWS has saved me a ton of time.
- kvz 10y ago
  Thanks! Transloadit founder here - just wanted to say if there's anything you feel we could do better we'd love to hear that too :+1:

samblr 10y ago

Neat. what stack are you using ? Something similar for those on GCP : https://goo.gl/dU0aKy https://goo.gl/dU0aKy

mpweiher 10y ago

I have to admit that I don't quite understand "image scaling as a service". Scaling is almost certainly a case where shipping the image over a network is significantly more costly than just doing the scaling locally?

chatmasta 10y ago
Here the only binary program you need installed to scale the image is curl. If you want to do it yourself, you need a whole bunch of image processing libraries installed. Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway. Then you're back to where you started, making an http call to an external service. Unless latency is a critical factor, an image scaling API is attractive because you do not need to waste development time setting up (and scaling) your own image processing environment.
- bluedino 10y ago
  In this case you also don't have to store the images.
- stephenr 10y ago
  > Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway Not everyone is obsessed with microservices.

traviswingo 10y ago

Awesome work! I have a suggestion/question. Why did you chose the pattern /:options/:image over /:image/:options ? Seems the latter would be more user friendly.

rayboy1995 10y ago
If the image url is in front there isn't exactly a sure fire way to tell where that url ends and where the options should begin. Of course there are work arounds, but the way it is now it seems that it would cover every case.
- traviswingo 10y ago
  Good point. Didn't think of that.

jimaek 10y ago

btw I am interested in all kinds of web performance optimization services including image hosting. If anyone is interested to partner up email me at dak@prospectone.io

pdimitar 10y ago
Could you clarify a little? What do you mean you're interested? You're founding a business and need a technical co-founder? You're a dev founding a business and need a technical partner? You're a dev looking for work in that area? Might be my English (not a native speaker) but your message isn't clear.

tonmoy 10y ago

This is the tester/hacker in me talking, but have you checked for cases where one can loop your own images hundreds of times? (e.g. https://i.scaley.io/jpg/i.scaley.io/png/i.imgur.com/DZjrx4E.jpg https://i.scaley.io/jpg/i.scaley.io/png/i.imgur.com/DZjrx4E.... but more than 2 times) A simple url DOS attack from my puny browser may cripple your entire server.

acdha 10y ago

Have you considered implementing IIIF? That's an emerging standard for constructing image URLs which has a growing amount of existing client support: http://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/ http://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/

inka 10y ago

Now I'm kicking myself because I did something very similar for one of my clients based on AWS and shared it publicly (https://github.com/pbudzon/aws-image-gateway https://github.com/pbudzon/aws-image-gateway)! Not sure how it compares cost-wise, though. It's a combination of CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda and S3. I'm quite sure CloudFront doesn't have limitations on what you can cache, like Cloudflare seems to have. Like others who commented, I don't get the idea of image-resize-as-a-service, so I remember I laughed at my client when they asked me for this. For some reason I believe it's better for the world if we don't make people think it's ok to throw around gigantic images around the cables when it's completely unnecessary...

codegeek 10y ago
Not your fault. Developers tend to sometimes underestimate the power of releasing a command line utility as a web based/API tool that can help non techies do simple stuff. Image resizing is a recurring candidate but there are others like conversion tools (to pdf), checkers/monitors (ssl for example) etc. Yes, you could do these on your server with a simple cmd line but tons of folks are willing to pay to be able to use a browser/API to do the same.
- bcjordan 10y ago
  It feels like a compelling property here is to have a "single point of continuously increasing quality"—that is, one changing chunk of code that is continuously improved and battle tested as more and more users report issues that require workarounds. (But of course ever-changing externally hosted web services like these have their drawbacks.)

karim79 10y ago

Related: https://kraken.io https://kraken.io

devy 10y ago
I wonder how is scaley comparing to kraken? I have used neither. Would love to hear others' experiences.

0XAFFE 10y ago

As so often: Please don't show a blank page when no javascript is available. Maybe a message that you should enable javascript or better some basic information what your service does.

time4tea 10y ago

https://github.com/springernature/immagine https://github.com/springernature/immagine If you want to host it yourself...

artursapek 10y ago

<snark>For something called "scaley" your logo looks very blurry on my high-dpi display. Use SVG!</snark>

nodesocket 10y ago

I'd like to echo the sentiment that offering 100% uptime and 3x, 5x, 10x refunds is a dangerous decision and actually will not increase paid signups. I've been doing operations/DevOps for over a decade (in fact I just launched a consulting startup (https://elasticbyte.net https://elasticbyte.net) that helps companies manage their cloud infrastructure). 100% uptime is a red flag, ops professionals never guarantee 100%. You instead should offer standard 99.9% (44 mins a month) or 99.99% (4 min 30 sec) with standard SLA language.

wingerlang 10y ago
Theoretically, I could sign up then DoS the site myself for a nice payout.

mgottein 10y ago

As someone who has never hosted an image service like this, what actions do you have to take to stop "bad" people from using your service? For example, uploading inappropriate / illegal / violent images.

stdio_h 10y ago
I developed a website for the university I attend that anyone can upload photographs of older exams for each course. In order to solve the image content problem the system checks every uploaded image with a 3rd party image recognition API[1] before saving it. Works pretty good so far! [1]https://clarifai.com/ https://clarifai.com/

dbbk 10y ago

How does this differ from Imgix?

franciscop 10y ago

I wonder if any thought was put into waifu [1]. While in western countries there is not such a big usercase, I know in Asia a good upscaling algorithm for manga would be really popular. [1] http://waifu2x.udp.jp/ http://waifu2x.udp.jp/

johnflan 10y ago

sudo apt-get install imagemagick?

mderazon 10y ago

My problem is usually making the cropping "smart". I need a content-aware cropping so that the resulting image looks good. It doesn't seem to come up too often as a known and requested feature in most of these services, I am wondering how come, this seems like a "must have" for me

fiatjaf 10y ago

It can't be open like that "just use our URL" because it will bring many free-riders and shutdown your server. But it also can't be a closed system with private keys and all that, because the hassle is too enormous -- the user will need a server to get the key for each image and so on. I have the impression that all services of this kind suffer from the above dual-problem.