
Image manipulation on the fly + CDN = awesome - roachsocal
http://cdnimag.es/
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traviskuhl
We had been using this on a few of our side projects for a while now (since
Amazon introduced custom origin servers on Cloudfront) and figured maybe it
was something others would find useful. The systems is modeled after a similar
system we used at Yahoo. Right now we're not charging or anything, just want
to see if people find it useful before we expand. Let us know if you have any
questions or have other features you'd like to see added.

~~~
petervandijck
First question would be about how much can I trust this. ie.: would you open
source it and provide it as a paying service at the same time (like, say,
wordpress). That's the surest way for me to trust any type of infrastructure,
ie. if you guys dissapoint or dissapear with the hosted service, I can run it
myself.

Second: how helpful is something like this really? Can you give some example
use cases?

~~~
roachsocal
Right now we're hosting it because it makes setup / integration time very
quick. We're considering going open source for those who want to setup a box
to do this yourself.

Here's an example of how we use it: We push original high resolution versions
of photos/graphics to S3. Then to make a page with smaller, cropped
thumbnails, it's as easy as calling for the image through Cloudfront with a
special cdnimag.es url. (example integation:
<http://www.seewhatiwore.com/browse>)

You'll notice with a site like Flickr, they generate five fixed sizes and they
are locked into those sizes across their site. (example:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappensuncle/183689226/sizes/l/...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappensuncle/183689226/sizes/l/in/photostream/))

With cdnimag.es you can generate variations of the original image (sizes,
crops, grayscale, reflection) on the fly without doing anything to the
original. All this while still enjoying the caching and performance benefits
of a CDN like Cloudfront.

~~~
bitsm
Would this service support direct uploads to S3?

~~~
traviskuhl
Yes. Currently our API supports pushing images to your S3 account
(<http://cdnimag.es/#anc_20>). You can also use our clients for quicker
integration (<https://github.com/traviskuhl/cdnimages-clients/>. currently
only PHP, but we have a Perl & Ruby client coming soon)

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shykes
Cirruxcache [1] recently added the same capabilities. It's open-source and
piggy-backs on Google App Engine - double awesome.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/cirruxcache/>

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geuis
Guys, seriously get rid of the grey on grey on grey action. Your site is
nearly unreadable. I recommend you talk to @limedaring, she's a remarkable
designer, was my cofounder, and has done great work for several YC companies.

~~~
traviskuhl
that's what happens when you let developers do design. definitely plan to
bring on a designer for the next version of the site.

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datums
interesting . . . I was thinking of a similar idea last year, using nginx's
image filter module (libgd) <http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpImageFilterModule>

