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).

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

I'm at the Enterprise level at Cloudinary

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.

Thanks! Yeah, we're storing IDs and we're already using a bucket. Thinking about it now, it doesn't seem so daunting. :)

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.

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.

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

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)

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?

(Employee of imgix here.)

Most of our feature benefits are derived from being a "full-stack" imaging solution. Because we know a lot more about the request and the client, we're able to perform operations to deliver the best image possible. One of the ways we do this is our automatic content negotiation strategy, which will serve up WebP images for Chrome, JPEG XR for IE 10+, etc. These more modern file formats tend to be much smaller, with some of our customers seeing a 40% reduction in their CDN bills as a result.

We're also able to push all of the work to our GPUs on our servers without worrying about noisy neighbors. This means our mean render time is 80ms, with the 90th percentile being 150ms. We wrote about our solution of racking Mac Pros: http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros

Sure, you can configure your own ImageMagick setup to do all of this. As you build this out, whether as an internal or external service, the economic realities of running ImageMagick in a virtualized environment catch up with you. It’s difficult to do this affordably and in a set-it-and-forget-it manner.

When explaining the benefits of imgix, I'm often reminded of the old jwz quote, "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Having stood up a few ImageMagick instances at previous jobs, I was happy to see imgix come along. Fast-forward a few years, and now I work there :)

Rather than ImageMagick, how do your benchmarks compare against libvips?

http://sharp.dimens.io/en/stable/

Not sure. We'll have to run some on our end and get back to you.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8440351 (written by another imgix employee)

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.

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

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