This is an excellent guide! A must read for web developers.
I am really glad we invested in automated image optimization where I work. We run a couple of large real-estate websites and we store tens of millions of images and process thousands a day. Optimizing all of them from the start was one of the best things we did.
When an image gets uploaded, we re-encode it with MozJPEG and WebP and then create thumbnails in five different sizes and upload them all to S3. They get served through a CDN. We initially did the re-encoding and scaling on the fly and then cache them forever. But MozJPEG is really slow so we changed the system to pre-process everything.
When we first implemented this two years ago, Chrome was the only browser that supported WebP. This investment really paid off as all major browsers now support WebP. The website loads really quickly and images rarely give us problems.
It's great to know you have implemented WebP in your pipeline.
Do check on-the fly optimisation tools like https://www.gumlet.com You can save a huge amount in server costs as well as developer and devops team time. Basically all image operations are done in the cloud and all images are served via super fast CDN - that too with cheaper price than a CDN.
Sort of. We run on Heroku, so we indirectly run on AWS.
We're heavy users of Python and we're using the excellent Pillow-SIMD [1] library to do most of the heavy lifting. We made our own builds to link it to MozJPEG instead of libjpeg and include libwebp.
I am really glad we invested in automated image optimization where I work. We run a couple of large real-estate websites and we store tens of millions of images and process thousands a day. Optimizing all of them from the start was one of the best things we did.
When an image gets uploaded, we re-encode it with MozJPEG and WebP and then create thumbnails in five different sizes and upload them all to S3. They get served through a CDN. We initially did the re-encoding and scaling on the fly and then cache them forever. But MozJPEG is really slow so we changed the system to pre-process everything.
When we first implemented this two years ago, Chrome was the only browser that supported WebP. This investment really paid off as all major browsers now support WebP. The website loads really quickly and images rarely give us problems.