11 ms·

Show HN: Firesize – On-the-fly image resizing, no code required

58 points by vanstee 12y ago

vanstee 12y ago
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 https://assembly.com/firesize
captn3m0 12y ago
Hi, I just recommended you to someone on weekendhacker chat earlier today. Glad to see another assembly launch.
jaredstenquist 12y ago
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 http://embed.ly/display
- vanstee 12y ago
  If you join during the beta, we'll grandfather you in to the free plan (no-limits). I should make that more clear on the homepage though. Thanks.
  - jaredstenquist 12y ago
    Awesome! One line about that should do the trick. Is the only way to "join" via Heroku? Or is there another place I can create an account?
    - vanstee 12y ago
      Yep, but only for the MVP. Adding our own signup form is something we're working on. Send me an email at firesize@helpful.io and I can manually hook you up with an account though.
ComputerGuru 12y ago
Nginx can do this with the ngx_http_image_filter_module (included in stock distribution): https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/nginx-wordpress-images-with-ngx_http_image_filter_module/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/nginx-wordpress-images-with-n...
- sanderjd 12y ago
  That's really neat and I hadn't seen it before. Thanks for the pointer.
- egonschiele 12y ago
  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.
- iamsalman 12y ago
  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. Disclaimer: I'm co-founder https://IMGX.io https://IMGX.io 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.
iokanuon 12y ago
>You're images will be quickly delivered to your users A typo. "You're" should be "Your".
- vanstee 12y ago
  Ah! Thanks iokanuon. If you add a bounty on Assembly, I'll award you some ownership for pointing this out: https://assembly.com/firesize/bounties https://assembly.com/firesize/bounties
ahultgren 12y ago
"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?
- vanstee 12y ago
  Oh yeah shoot me an email (firesize@helpful.io). We're working on making it available in other regions as well. Sorry about that.
ljqwfk83id 12y ago
Just so you know, Web of Trust gives firesize.com a "Very Poor" Trustworthiness and Child Safety rating. https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/firesize.com?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/firesize.com?utm_source=a...
- callumjones 12y ago
  Based on one comment in 2009, surely WOT needs a better algorithm for refreshing these ratings as time passes.
  - doobiedoobie 11y ago
    YEAHH MANNNNEE I TTTLLY SEE THIS AS A PROBLEM FOR SURE.
imaginenore 12y ago
Is this really a problem painful enough that you need a SaaS?
- jaredstenquist 12y ago
  Depending on what you are building, yes. This can save a developer a good portion of a day between the code, file storage and CDN.
  - vanstee 12y ago
    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.
shachar 12y ago
Very similar to Cloudinary, though they have more advanced features as well. worth checking out IMO.
jastanton 12y ago
Great :), first impressions: 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!
- vanstee 12y ago
  Oh yeah a default would be nice. Good idea. 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 https://github.com/asm-products/firesize
jdotjdot 12y ago
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?
- vanstee 12y ago
  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.
  - jdotjdot 12y ago
    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 :)
xfalcox 12y ago
We are using thumbor self hosted to solve a similar problem. It evens smart crop with opencv features detection, like people faces.
seanalltogether 12y ago
Quick bug report, g_none seems to not be working, instead it's just doing the same thing as g_north http://firesize.com/720x100/g_none/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJscb.png http://firesize.com/720x100/g_none/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJsc... http://firesize.com/720x100/g_north/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJscb.png http://firesize.com/720x100/g_north/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJs...
Retr0spectrum 12y ago
One small issue is that it doesn't correct for gamma. Most browsers don't even do it properly, so it isn't a very important issue at all. Demo: http://firesize.com/100x100/g_center/http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma_dalai_lama_gray.jpg http://firesize.com/100x100/g_center/http://www.4p8.com/eric... More info: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html
blowski 12y ago
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?
- sfeng 12y ago
  This is actually also an OS project it appears: https://github.com/asm-products/firesize https://github.com/asm-products/firesize
  - nthtran 12y ago
    Firesize uses ImageMagick, which in my experience consumes more memory and is slower than libvips [1] for simple image resizing/optimization. I built a simple image-resizing server with a query string API using libvips [2]. This is based on sharp [3], a good wrapper of libvips for Node.js. [1] https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips [2] https://github.com/nthtran/imgop https://github.com/nthtran/imgop [3] https://github.com/lovell/sharp https://github.com/lovell/sharp
  - iamsalman 12y ago
    We wrote the complete image processing oursleves, accelerated on GPUs @ https://IMGX.io https://IMGX.io (checkout Image URL API).
- rcklmbr 12y ago
  Definitely seeing it. But if you want open source, check out imagesquish https://github.com/dmcquay/imagesquish https://github.com/dmcquay/imagesquish
- egonschiele 12y ago
  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.
michaelmior 12y ago
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. [0] http://cloudinary.com/blog/on_the_fly_image_manipulations_secured_with_signed_urls http://cloudinary.com/blog/on_the_fly_image_manipulations_se...
- vanstee 12y ago
  Yep, we're actively building both url whitelists per Firesize account and url signing.
kristopolous 12y ago
I have an old project that does a similar thing: https://github.com/kristopolous/apophnia https://github.com/kristopolous/apophnia ... enjoy
sfeng 12y ago
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 https://github.com/EagerApps/FireSize
fiatjaf 12y ago
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?
joshmn 12y ago
g_center, assuming there are more options, could very well be a select option with the other available options. :)
pajtai 12y ago
what different things do you offer than cloudimage? http://cloudimage.io/ http://cloudimage.io/

58 points by vanstee 12y ago

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 https://assembly.com/firesize

captn3m0 12y ago

Hi, I just recommended you to someone on weekendhacker chat earlier today. Glad to see another assembly launch.

jaredstenquist 12y ago

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 http://embed.ly/display

vanstee 12y ago
If you join during the beta, we'll grandfather you in to the free plan (no-limits). I should make that more clear on the homepage though. Thanks.
- jaredstenquist 12y ago
  Awesome! One line about that should do the trick. Is the only way to "join" via Heroku? Or is there another place I can create an account?
  - vanstee 12y ago
    Yep, but only for the MVP. Adding our own signup form is something we're working on. Send me an email at firesize@helpful.io and I can manually hook you up with an account though.

ComputerGuru 12y ago

Nginx can do this with the ngx_http_image_filter_module (included in stock distribution): https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/nginx-wordpress-images-with-ngx_http_image_filter_module/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/nginx-wordpress-images-with-n...

sanderjd 12y ago
That's really neat and I hadn't seen it before. Thanks for the pointer.
egonschiele 12y ago
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.
iamsalman 12y ago
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. Disclaimer: I'm co-founder https://IMGX.io https://IMGX.io 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.

iokanuon 12y ago

>You're images will be quickly delivered to your users A typo. "You're" should be "Your".

vanstee 12y ago
Ah! Thanks iokanuon. If you add a bounty on Assembly, I'll award you some ownership for pointing this out: https://assembly.com/firesize/bounties https://assembly.com/firesize/bounties

ahultgren 12y ago

"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?

vanstee 12y ago
Oh yeah shoot me an email (firesize@helpful.io). We're working on making it available in other regions as well. Sorry about that.

ljqwfk83id 12y ago

Just so you know, Web of Trust gives firesize.com a "Very Poor" Trustworthiness and Child Safety rating. https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/firesize.com?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/firesize.com?utm_source=a...

callumjones 12y ago
Based on one comment in 2009, surely WOT needs a better algorithm for refreshing these ratings as time passes.
- doobiedoobie 11y ago
  YEAHH MANNNNEE I TTTLLY SEE THIS AS A PROBLEM FOR SURE.

imaginenore 12y ago

Is this really a problem painful enough that you need a SaaS?

jaredstenquist 12y ago
Depending on what you are building, yes. This can save a developer a good portion of a day between the code, file storage and CDN.
- vanstee 12y ago
  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.

shachar 12y ago

Very similar to Cloudinary, though they have more advanced features as well. worth checking out IMO.

jastanton 12y ago

Great :), first impressions: 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!

vanstee 12y ago
Oh yeah a default would be nice. Good idea. 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 https://github.com/asm-products/firesize

jdotjdot 12y ago

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?

vanstee 12y ago
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.
- jdotjdot 12y ago
  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 :)

xfalcox 12y ago

We are using thumbor self hosted to solve a similar problem. It evens smart crop with opencv features detection, like people faces.

seanalltogether 12y ago

Quick bug report, g_none seems to not be working, instead it's just doing the same thing as g_north http://firesize.com/720x100/g_none/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJscb.png http://firesize.com/720x100/g_none/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJsc... http://firesize.com/720x100/g_north/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJscb.png http://firesize.com/720x100/g_north/http://i.imgur.com/hHpJs...

Retr0spectrum 12y ago

One small issue is that it doesn't correct for gamma. Most browsers don't even do it properly, so it isn't a very important issue at all. Demo: http://firesize.com/100x100/g_center/http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma_dalai_lama_gray.jpg http://firesize.com/100x100/g_center/http://www.4p8.com/eric... More info: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

blowski 12y ago

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?

sfeng 12y ago
This is actually also an OS project it appears: https://github.com/asm-products/firesize https://github.com/asm-products/firesize
- nthtran 12y ago
  Firesize uses ImageMagick, which in my experience consumes more memory and is slower than libvips [1] for simple image resizing/optimization. I built a simple image-resizing server with a query string API using libvips [2]. This is based on sharp [3], a good wrapper of libvips for Node.js. [1] https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips [2] https://github.com/nthtran/imgop https://github.com/nthtran/imgop [3] https://github.com/lovell/sharp https://github.com/lovell/sharp
- iamsalman 12y ago
  We wrote the complete image processing oursleves, accelerated on GPUs @ https://IMGX.io https://IMGX.io (checkout Image URL API).
rcklmbr 12y ago
Definitely seeing it. But if you want open source, check out imagesquish https://github.com/dmcquay/imagesquish https://github.com/dmcquay/imagesquish
egonschiele 12y ago
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.

michaelmior 12y ago

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. [0] http://cloudinary.com/blog/on_the_fly_image_manipulations_secured_with_signed_urls http://cloudinary.com/blog/on_the_fly_image_manipulations_se...

vanstee 12y ago
Yep, we're actively building both url whitelists per Firesize account and url signing.

kristopolous 12y ago

I have an old project that does a similar thing: https://github.com/kristopolous/apophnia https://github.com/kristopolous/apophnia ... enjoy

sfeng 12y ago

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 https://github.com/EagerApps/FireSize

fiatjaf 12y ago

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?

joshmn 12y ago

g_center, assuming there are more options, could very well be a select option with the other available options. :)

pajtai 12y ago

what different things do you offer than cloudimage? http://cloudimage.io/ http://cloudimage.io/