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How Yipit Scales Thumbnailing With Thumbor and Cloudfront

30 points| zmsmith | 13 years ago |tech.yipit.com

9 comments

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e98cuenc|13 years ago

Thumbor and imgix seem nice products. I'm also working on another very similar product, http://thumbr.it/. I guess our main differentiator is that we also do thumbnails of documents and we allow the user to create their own effects on the photos. However, we don't have any of the text options available on imgix, or the smart crop that keeps faces in the image.

From a quick glance at Thumbor, it seems it also offers object detection (like faces), which is a nice add-on. Nice post, I didn't knew about this project, even though I'm working on the same space!

joseflorido|13 years ago

I have been using Thumbr.it for a while now and I have to say that we are impressed with the speed and great support!

We'd love to see on the fly retina display processing added to it too ;)

sheraz|13 years ago

It's always encouraging to see others find similar solutions. I've been working on a asset management tool that dealt with thumbnail generation. Only I've done it in PHP.

First, I came across timthumb[1], but it was a little too heavy for my liking. Instead I whipped up a thumbnail-on-demand script with caching options in about 3 hours and 80 lines of code.

Now the best part -- I don't have to use a work-queue on the server side to offload thumbnailing. The browser will do that on first request, and results are cache from then on.

[1] - https://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

cedricd|13 years ago

Why not use a service like http://www.imgix.com/ instead?

zmsmith|13 years ago

Looks like a nice service. We definitely would have considered it. Thumbor is very easy to administer though, and we already use/trust Cloudfront.

neya|13 years ago

Thank you so much for this! I've been searching for a similar service all along!! Looks awesome!!! Thanks :)

rajivtiru|13 years ago

I need a way to do this in Apache and/or PHP.

I think Cloudfront has a way to pass variables to your server so theoretically you can use any image generation package right?

donavanm|13 years ago

Cloudfront can vary objects by using a different uri stem, query params, or cookie contents. As noted in the article you can also route uri prefixs to your image sizer origin. So yes, I'd expect most image manipulation to be cachable using query strings for size/format/quality and a sane default for the base uri.