Introduction to ixmage
Explanation of how the service can benefit youixmage is a Software As A Service that works as a layer between your image repositories and users of those assets. It will optimize your images so your website, and your visitors, gain a boost in speed. It can also transform your images in different ways that you request.
It can perform on-the-fly transformations of image assets, and will serve them thru CDN for efficiency.
The CDN component helps reduce page load times, which has a direct relation to search engine ranking scores.
The transformation tools help to reduce (and sometimes eliminate) designer time to produce different variants from the same source image.
Interactive Demo
Source of Images
Aliases
ixmage will work with any source that is publicly available on the internet.
Have your images available on your servers, or in an Amazon S3 bucket, or in a Digital Ocean space… as long as they are available thru http[s], ixmage can work with them.
Protected Images
ixmage can also work with images in private S3 Buckets, private DigitalOcean Spaces, and private Google Storages.
Benefits
No need to work on, and keep, different versions/variants of an image asset to tailor it to different consumption channels (web/mobile/ecomm/etc.), and/or different parts of a website.
On-the-fly processing so you only need to keep track of your originals.
You keep a good hi-res (high resolution) image that you can use in multiple places, always serving an optimized version.
ixmage can send images in WebP automatically if the client/browser supports it, otherwise, the image will be served in a more common format.
Image Manipulation
The most common use-case is to present your images in different sizes, or at sizes that probably need to be produced from a master image. These cases become trivial with the querystring API presented by the service.
Control the quality of your photos. For the JPG format, which is the preferred format for photographs, you are able to dramatically reduce your asset size by specifying a quality value (from 0-100). Often times, a 5% reduction in quality can go a long way for decreasing file size, without producing a noticeable quality decrease to the naked-eye.
Fast Delivery
All image access is done thru CDN to take advantage of huge response time boosts. CDN also handles serving your images to distant places in the world from your image source so everyone can have a nice browsing experience.
Origin Protection
The origin/source of your images is kept hidden when accessing your assets thru the API url. This is achieved thru your aliases configurations.
Simplicity & Usability
All transformations can be triggered and configured thru the url querystring API. See the documentation.
You can set up commonly used transformations and give them a name so that usability and working with variants in code becomes easier.
For example, you can turn `?width=90&height=90&format=jpg&quality=60` >-into-> `?t=thumbnail`Watermark Feature
When setting up your image sources, you can specify watermarking features.
Access Restriction & Configuration
When setting up your image sources, you can specify access as a white-list of domains using request referers.
Even more restrictions with signed urls
Lock a group of images so that their access url cannot be tampered (change transformation values). The url will contain a key parameter, which prevents the url from being changed. Read more about keys.
Free Plan
ixmage has a free tier that can be used to explore and test its capabilites.