imgix
More info
- Creator
- Chris Zacharias
- Founded
- 2011
- Type
- Image CDN
- Website
- imgix.com
An image CDN that crops, compresses and reformats images on the fly via URL parameters.
imgix (the company Zebrafish Labs) was founded in 2011 by Chris Zacharias, formerly of YouTube. Instead of pre-generating every image size, you drop the original in a bucket and request variants through the query string: ?w=400&fm=webp&q=70 yields a 400 px-wide WebP. The result is then cached at the edge.
The idea — transformations encoded in the URL in front of a CDN — is shared with Cloudinary, which arrived around the same time but pushed harder into video. Together they defined the "image as a service" genre.