You never need to move your assets.
Our service has been designed from the ground up to work directly with your assets wherever they currently live. We never require you to import, upload, or transfer your assets to make use of our service. Whether you meticulously organize your asset buckets or you have one large catch-all asset bucket, we will help you make sense of your assets and make them available for serving to your users as you need, without ever having to relocate them to us. In fact, we actively encourage you to keep your original, high-resolution images in your bucket and let us dynamically render whatever images you may need from them, on-demand.
Several other services require you to store your assets on their servers in order to make use of their services and as part of locking you in. Some of them even advertise that you can “bring your own bucket”, but that is simply another way of saying that you can (and sometimes have to) import your assets into their system.
Your images and videos are always the authority.
Your asset bucket or buckets are always the authoritative source of your visual media. If you make changes to your original image or video, such as deleting or replacing an asset in your bucket, we will reflect these changes in our systems without you having to do anything. If you want your changes to take effect immediately, we offer tools to purge any out-of-date visual content so that the new content goes live right away.
Since some other services require you to store your assets with them, any changes you make in your original asset bucket will not be reflected in their systems, thus making it easy for the two systems to drift apart.
This is not ImageMagick on EC2.
Everyone’s first thought is to build out their image infrastructure themselves. That usually means using legacy imaging technologies that were never meant to scale and then shoe-horning them into cloud service providers so that they can be horizontally scaled. However, before you know it, you are spending exorbitant amounts on your cloud bills, the technology starts to break down in ways you never anticipated, upgrading it become a nightmare, and finding the right code to fix or the right people to fix it gets harder and harder. Worst of all, this is the path many image service providers have chosen to double down on and then simply pass the costs on to you.
We understand that building a highly scalable, reliable visual media service takes the best technologies, the best infrastructure, and the best engineers to get right. Even then, it is a delicate balance of features, costs, and performance before everything works the way it needs to. This is why we invest heavily into our own rendering pipelines and leverage the best technology partners in the industry to ensure that we can provide you the best possible products at the lowest costs.
Use anywhere, integrate everywhere.
We built imgix using the simplest and most time-tested web standards, maximizing where and how our service can be used by our customers. Our URL-based image Rendering API and Video API use query string parameters to control and transform the output images and videos, which is how the URL specification originally intended requests like these to behave. The result is a powerful and elegant solution for embedding images and videos into your websites or apps. It is as simple as providing an imgix URL directly in the 'src' attribute of an <img> tag.
For more advanced control over your service, we provide JSON APIs that you can integrate into your website, applications, and tools. Or, you can leverage one of our many client libraries and integrations to take care of the heavy lifting for you, empowering you to get up and running even faster. Our SDK team is continuously adding new libraries, integrations, and tools to help ensure that imgix can be easily integrated into any stack.
We can save you money and make you money.
Getting your visual media right is incredibly important to your business. Achieving the best compression levels and file formats, while maintaining the highest quality images and videos, will reduce the amount of money you spend on every request your users make. Better optimized images and videos, delivered closer to your end users via CDN, will result in faster page loads which is well-known to increase conversion rates, time on site, and engagement. Not having to build or run this kind of infrastructure yourself means you can direct your engineering talents in other areas or reduce your overall engineering needs. By using imgix, you get all of these benefits without having to become an expert in digital imaging yourself. Our goal is to empower your visual media to amplify your business, not cost it.
Easy and predictable pricing.
Our pricing plans are structured based on the number of Origin Images you have. To make our service flexible and worry-free, we offer unlimited transformations. That means you can render any size, shape, format, or quality as many times as you like at no extra cost. Fine tune your assets as often as you like and be protected from unexpectedly incurring additional rendering costs, such as when a new device enters the market that requests a whole new set of image sizes. Our pricing model is designed to help you get the most out of your images and videos without having to worry about micromanaging your usage.
We are the most experienced in the business.
For over ten years, we have been building imgix into the service that it is today. And even before that, many members of our team worked on the biggest web properties in the world, including Google, Apple, YouTube, Yahoo, Netflix, Yelp, and many more. We have seen huge scale both inside and outside of our company, the kind of scale few people ever get a chance to work on. We have seen it all before. This is why we’re trusted to serve the visual assets on over 27 million websites, including several of the Alexa Top 10 websites and many of the Alexa Top 1000. It takes experience to process and deliver hundreds of thousands of visula assets per second with over 99.9% uptime, and we have that experience.
We are reliable and transparent.
Your business matters to us and we recognize that keeping our service up is critical to your business. Of the last one trillion images we have served, we have successfully delivered 99.9992% of them, meaning that fewer than eight out of every one million images served is an error. That being said, sometimes things do go wrong. When they do, we want you to know about it first so that you can respond accordingly. That is why we actively update our status page for even the slightest disruptions, why we have 24-hour support coverage, and why we provide detailed public post-mortems for any event that directly impacts customers. We recognize that past performance is not a guarantee for future success, so we invest heavily in building reliable infrastructure, enforcing best practices, and honing our team’s response times.