It’s nearly impossible to imagine a modern web application without images: product photos, user avatars, blog post illustrations, and more – all this content needs to be handled appropriately to ensure optimal performance and user experience. While building an image processing pipeline may not look like rocket science at first glance, it is full of pitfalls and edge cases, and its maintenance can quickly become a burden. That’s where ready-to-use solutions like imgproxy come into play.
What is imgproxy?
imgproxy is a fast and secure image processing server that allows you to resize, crop, and optimize images on-the-fly. It supports a wide range of image formats – JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and more – and provides numerous transformation options, like resizing, cropping, rotating, watermarking, and applying various filters. All the processing options are specified directly in the image URL and performed on demand, making imgproxy a flexible and efficient solution for handling images in web applications.
Designed for simplicity
One of imgproxy’s key strengths is its simplicity. A single Docker container is all you need to get started — and you can optionally pair it with a CDN for caching to minimize repeated processing. No need to set up your servers with image processing libraries and ensure your application can communicate with them – imgproxy has everything ready to go out of the box. You can get it up and running in your development environment in minutes and have a production-ready setup the same day. Whether you install it on a single server or deploy it in a Kubernetes cluster, imgproxy fits every infrastructure.
imgproxy’s straightforward URL-based API, along with its comprehensible documentation, enables you to integrate it into your application quickly. You can generate image URLs with the desired transformations directly in your code, and imgproxy will handle the rest.
Built for performance
Every single part of imgproxy is developed to be as fast as possible. imgproxy leverages the fastest image processing library available – libvips – and follows best practices for performance optimization. Just take a look at the benchmark results with other OSS image processing servers to see the difference!
imgproxy is easy to scale horizontally, allowing you to handle increased load by simply adding more instances. imgproxy provides you with all the metrics needed for a weighted decision on when to scale up or down. Combined with a CDN for caching processed images, this makes imgproxy a highly efficient solution for serving images to users worldwide with minimal latency.
Security first
Though image processing is a wide attack surface, not every solution takes this seriously. imgproxy, on the other hand, has security in its core. It provides multiple security features, from URL signing to restricting source image sources and transformation options. You can build just the right level of security for your application without compromising flexibility.
Being a self-hosted solution, imgproxy does not send images to any third-party services. This gives you full control over your data and ensures compliance with privacy regulations.
Processes images for the services you use
imgproxy is a battle-tested solution trusted by many popular services and platforms. Be it a blog platform like Medium, a showcase site like Dribbble, a social network like Bluesky, or an e-commerce giant like Trendyol, imgproxy handles image processing across industries and use cases. You probably interact with imgproxy-powered images every day without even realizing it!
Open-source and free to use
imgproxy is an open-source project released under the MIT license. This means you can use it freely in your projects, modify it to fit your needs, and contribute to its development. The imgproxy community is active and welcoming, with regular updates and improvements being made to the project. If you ever run into issues or have questions, you can turn to the community for support.
When you need more
While the open-source version of imgproxy covers most use cases, imgproxy Pro extends the toolbox even further. It adds features like video, PDF, and PSD preview generation, advanced watermarking options, advanced AI-powered smart cropping, image info retrieval, and more. It also comes with priority support, ensuring you get help when you need it.
Give it a try!
If you are looking for an image processing solution for your new project or considering replacing your existing setup, give imgproxy a try. Check out the getting started guide, and who knows – imgproxy might be the missing piece in your image processing puzzle!
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