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Comment by anonymoushn | Hacker News Reader

Can you share which imgix features you are using? We were using imgix for resizing only. That was not a good use of money.

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So the resizing alone makes Imgix very valuable to us. We're in an interesting situation though, where we have relatively few `master` images, but hundreds of renders per image, which are then seen millions of times each month. That's a perfect fit with Imgix's pricing model.

We tried Imgix on a few other products where we had tens of thousands of images being uploaded each month and only seen a couple hundred times per image. That became prohibitively expensive — which is probably a similar situation that you ended up in (high number of `master` images to render ratio).

In addition to realtime resizing, we use:

- face detection - typesetting - overlays - cropping/point of interest cropping - color palette - exif/image metadata - client hints - automatic content negotiation

Pretty much everything except their watermarking endpoint haha ;)

That's a lot of stuff! I certainly couldn't make a good argument for writing a replacement for all those features. Thanks!

Out of curiosity, why are you seeing hundreds of renders per image? I'd think it'd be significantly fewer than that, unless you've got a lot of stuff going on in the background that isn't really obvious--it sounds like you're sometimes doing some significant editing beyond what the photographer has already done.

We had a pretty high bill with Imgix just from resizing, and I agree, it makes sense to switch (we wrote https://github.com/humanmade/node-tachyon for use on AWS Lambda instead). However, some of the Imgix features are pretty killer if you want to do advanced handling there.

I think this post is turning out to be quite a nice piece of marketing for Imgix. After reading about it I signed up immediately and already entered my CC details.

For me the killer feature is being able to crop images such that a detected face within the image is centered.

I've been using Thumbor[1] on an EC2 instance and once OpenCV is installed the face & feature detection has been great. Combined with a similar style of "put the transforms in the URL" on demand method of serving images it's been awesome.

[1]: http://thumbor.org/

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