The image filter module is really neat, but for people reading it is limited to basic functionality like crop and resize. It supports PNG, GIF and JPEG, but PNGs are usually too large and GIFs are low quality, so you are stuck with JPEGs. Not sure if webp support is on the way or not.
There's one serious problem with using 3rd party Imaging SDKs or utilities to build your service on: You're stuck with their flaws and you can't do much about it.
We have written our own image processing SDK, using only encoders which are 3rd party (libpng, libjpeg, libwebp etc), rest is all handwritten, GPU optimized code. The rationale behind it was to be able to tweak/optimize any feature.
Looks great. I see mention of limits, but there is no pricing page. It's hard to adopt a service if I have no idea what it will cost me.
I have used Embed.ly's similar service in the past. There is a sizable free tier (25,000 images) and it works more or less the same. http://embed.ly/display
This was built by our awesome community on Assembly. If you have any feedback or want to get involved and help us continue to build this, check out the project on Assembly: https://assembly.com/firesize
Bit off-topic, but... it feels like there's a trend towards "x as a service" away from "x as open-source software". Is that something other people are seeing, or is it just my imagination?
There's an in-between trend of "X as open-source software but we can host it for you as a service". It seems like a pretty promising way for open source projects to still make money. I think if an open source project can figure out how function as a business, that's a sign it will stick around.
Do you have a utility that lets me port over my named transformations from Cloudinary? Also, is there any way to pull images directly from an S3 bucket rather than from my Heroku instance?
Oh nope, but that would be pretty sweet. I'll throw that in the queue of things to build next.
We just grab whatever image you include in the url, so as long as the images in your S3 bucket are public, Firesize should be able to resize them just like normal.
I like your pricing model much more--I don't like how Cloudinary charges me for storage, because I don't want them to store the images, just transform them.
What I would need to move over to yours are the following features:
* Reorienting the picture based on exif data
* Picture gravity via face detection
* Way to ensure no one else maliciously uses my account (e.g., domain whitelisting/CORS, only pulling from my S3 bucket, something like that)
* Renaming the output file image on the fly
Obviously, I'm only one customer, so don't do anything based on just me! But if it's at all helpful, these are one potential user's needs :)
Is there anything yet to prevent abuse? For example, in the case of Cloudinary, they allow signing of URLs[0] to prevent anyone from just using your account to serve arbitrary images.
I've seen a few of these before and the things I remember I liked about them was the ability to provide a default image incase you cannot load the image.
Major kudos if you could do a g_face so you could center / crop around faces!
You say you provide a CDN and yet the images are loading slow under HackerNews weight. I guess the type of people who are going to use these aren't super concerned about being hammered!
Lastly the Heroku add-on, does that mean I can run your code on my Heroku instance instead of rely on your site? That would be fantastic!
The image on the homepage isn't behind a CDN, but when you signup we give you a custom subdomain which is behind a CDN. Although the initial loading and resizing still takes a quick second, before we cache it.
Not exactly. The Heroku addon just means you can easily signup and manage Firesize from the Heroku dashboard. Although the code is AGPL'd so you could totally run your own hosted version of Firesize: https://github.com/asm-products/firesize
"This app is in region eu, firesize is only available in region us." Thats a shame. But is guess getting manually hooked up would work for this case too?
I built a JavaScript library which automatically applies this optimization to all the images on any site it's placed on (using a MutationObserver): https://github.com/EagerApps/FireSize
Free during beta, but how much will it cost after? Are you going to limit access through the Referrer header? Why do I need a Heroku addon if I can just use a Firesize URL from anywhere automatically? How much does it cost to run a massive service like that?
Yep that's exactly why we built it. To be honest it's not overly complex to build yourself, but taking the time to get it right, setting up the CDN, and maintaining background workers can be pretty expensive when you factor in developer hours.
