Looking for a good Dynamic Imaging Solution

Question

I work for a small E-Commerce shop and we are looking for a process that will handle resizing our product images dynamically. Currently our designers take high resolution photos, either provided by the manufactures or created in house, and alter them to fit various pages on our site. The designers are constantly resizing, cropping, altering compression levels, etc., of each product photo to fit the needs of the business. Being that our product line is updated frequently, this becomes a monotonous task.

Abobe Scene7 does exactly what we are looking to do and the images are served up from a CDN. Unfortunately we found it to be too expensive.

I'm curious to learn how others handle this process at their organizations. Does anyone know of any good 3rd party tools or other SAAS providers that can handle performing some basic image manipulation and serving them on the fly?

Answer 1

Webqem is an Australian based company that offers a SAAS solution to dynamic imaging at a very competitive rate.

Check out the website at http://www.maxoom.com.au, there are a number of videos showing how functions within the service work.

Answer 2

A lot of what you describe can be accomplished using components available in the .NET framework.

We've used the COM version of ImageGlue with great success and found it to be very stable and effective. When someone uploads an image through our admin site, I use ImageGlue to generate a thumbnail and resize the image before storing it. You could also do that dynamically by having your image tags refer to a url like

<img src="/services/image?id=1231231&w=200&keepAspect=1">

and have the Image page or service generate the image and stream it back to the browser.

This doesn't address issues like content delivery networks, but it's relatively inexpensive and might get you pointed in the right direction.