Show HN: Imgix Sandbox – Explore on-demand image processing

https://sandbox.imgix.com

by zacman85 • 11 years ago

46 18 11 years ago

sandbox.imgix.com

Looks very similar to Cloudinary (http://cloudinary.com) which I use for my startup. The pricing at lower end of images looks better for Imgix but doesn't scale as well. Still, I think cloud-hosted image processing is a great service and I'm glad there is competition in it. It let us skip huge amounts of dev work related to constructing image pipelines and organizing assets: we pay $40 (plus more for some addons) and get a massive image layer. Imgix, Cloudinary, and others let you focus on the unique parts of your own software at a really good price.

monksy2• 11 years ago

So this is imagmagik as a service?

chrislloyd• 11 years ago

From their homepage: "This is not ImageMagick running on EC2"

monksy2• 11 years ago

Oh, ok I didn't see that from the link provided.

kogir• 11 years ago

If ImageMagick meets your needs, use it.

However, after doing so, you may find that it's terrible code, slow, leaky, and a giant pain to use in production at any real scale.

notduncansmith2• 11 years ago

I'd like to give a big shout-out to Imgix, they've built a truly useful service. Their landing page copy features lines like "You can't build this in a weekend" and "This isn't ImageMagick running on EC2" - and from what I've seen using them, they live up to it. Kudos on a great product, Imgix team (and congrats on the recent funding)!

P.S. We tried using Cloudinary at first, but Imgix turned out to be much easier to manage. A killer feature for us was allowing us to source images from an S3 bucket (a feature Cloudinary only exposes to Enterprise customers).

tortilla2• 11 years ago

I'm on Cloudinary and looking to migrate out. How difficult was it to switch?

I'm at the Enterprise level at Cloudinary

notduncansmith2• 11 years ago

I have no idea how hard it would be for you, we're still young so it was quite painless for us. The biggest thing is to move from storing image URLs to storing image IDs (which, if you're on Cloudinary, you may already be doing). If you're already uploading to your own S3 bucket, you're most of the way there.

mmastrac• 11 years ago

I was skeptical about imgix, but I recently plugged it into a CMS for a startup I was helping out as a simple image editor + transcoding service. It did pretty much all the work: all I did was add a few buttons to alter the bri/con/vib parameters, and hook the crop up to simple jQuery cropper plugin.

We're also using it as a way to upload jpeg2000 files from iOS devices to save on bandwidth, which will then appear properly on Android and desktop.

I'd say it saved me a fair bit of infrastructure work.

EDIT: They had an outage the other day where new images weren't being cached that was fixed within a few hours (that sucked), but were awesome enough to provide a root cause for me.

biturd• 11 years ago

as per the notes, I am forwarding this error message on:

404 Not Found The server can not find the requested page:

www.texturequalitypro.com/assets/files/content_files/TextureQualityPro_Large_Sample.jpg?w=250&border=5&txt=this+is+a+test&vib=20 (port 443) Please forward this error screen to www.texturequalitypro.com's WebMaster.

Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.29 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4 Server at www.texturequalitypro.com Port 443

choonkeat• 11 years ago

having an image server with apis solves 80% of the problem.

having a client counterpart lib to ease you in solves the other 80% https://github.com/choonkeat/attache_rails

being able to host it yourself solves the last 20% https://github.com/choonkeat/attache

skuhn• 11 years ago

The imgix sandbox is meant as a tool to experiment and try things out.

Behind the scenes it uses imgix's production infrastructure via the published API. We think it's really helpful to be able to quickly iterate over ideas, and we plan to use it ourselves within our API documentation.

The imgix API is documented over at https://www.imgix.com/docs/reference

Client libraries are at https://www.imgix.com/docs/libraries

(also, I think your percentages may overflow)

n0thing• 11 years ago

Assuming you're not using ImageMagick, what are you using and what makes your solution superior? Do you have any benchmarks comparing against ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick?

Show HN: Imgix Sandbox – Explore on-demand image processing

Related Stories