What does HackerNews think of thumbor?

I think one reason is that image resizing algorithms are nontrivial. An image uploader sounds simple enough until you start supporting many different scaling algorithms [1] across a bunch of formats. Browsers are already big and complex enough IMO. This could be easily / best handled by a library instead.

Another point is that holding onto the unmodified images server-side (and merely serving a cached, resized, optimized version on the fly) can be beneficial for future use cases.

Check out, e.g., Thumbor [2] if you're curious to see more of the complexities involved. I have self-hosted it for a company before, and it worked well.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

[2]: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

I recommend Thumbor if you want the advanced manipulation and smart cropping features common in the hosted services: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

I'm a bit surprised there's no mention of image optimization proxy / services like thumbor[0] (which is open source). Instead of pre-processing all your images, it lets you worry about it later. You can compose different transformations and filters (e.g. add a watermark, resize, crop etc). This is especially useful when things on the website change. It lets you keep the original at full size, and transform them as you need.

There are some commercial services in this space, as well as other similar open source services.

If you're looking for a quick way to get thumbor up and running with docker, I'd plug https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor

[0] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

Thumbor is an awesome open source solution which has proved itself in many high traffic sites.

https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

We were using imgix for a while and were generally happy, but things started go downhill and some point, or so it felt anyway. Their support was always a bit opaque. And the service itself didn't evolve (as far as rendering. E.g. Composing more than one of the same filter wasn't really possible... for example adding two watermarks). We've also had issues with CORS headers that weren't resolved and our end users couldn't get images some times...

We switched to host our own thumbor (open source), and couldn't be happier. We pay around a quarter or less than before (even with failover in place) as well.

We really wanted to use a hosted service. We're not keen on hosting stuff out of our core business. But in this case it just didn't work out.

EDIT: link to Thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

Same Idea of Globo (Brazilian TV conglomerate) https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

About Grid, it seems the images are stored on FTP. Am I right?

I look for a solution like these, but more flexibe, where I could host my images on AWS, Azure, etc.

There's also thumbor (https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor). It's a very mature implementation of this type of server and has been very battle-tested (https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/wiki/Who%27s-using-it).

At globo.com we have near a billion images (we are a big portal). Can you imagine pre-generating that many images every time a new format gets added?

We serve everything with thumbor with a Varnish cache in front of it and we're very happy with it. It has enabled our designers to work with any image size they can think of.

If you guys need more info, please check thumbor's docs: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/wiki/