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Comment by genezeta | Hacker News Reader

I know of at least one similar site where all that is achieved dynamically in the server. Images can be rotated, cropped, and resized dynamically. Common cuts can be made, cuts are cached, and making a new cut is done on the fly without noticeable delay by passing different parameter values.

This has been working now for about 6 years. It has never been a problem for the frontend team in any way.

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That method is adding server, client and network load by delivering multiple versions of the same image, whereas a cached version on the front end can be freely re-used and manipulated as needed based on the specifics of the device and browser. It's not a matter of being a problem for the front end team. It's a problem for devops and the end user.

It hasn't been a problem for the backend or devop teams either.

The network load is... probably not something you, or me, can so offhandedly talk about here without the actual data. It depends a lot on which images are most used. I do know that they did in fact reduce a lot of bandwidth by serving pre-sized thumbnails instead of larger images. Typically there's only a few -3, 4- different sizes that matter; these can be -and are- cached by the browser. In this case, most visitors seemed to never need the full-size format, so that's a lot of saved bandwidth.

Has it been a problem for sites that don’t have that available in their backend?

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