photon VS jpegoptim

Image processing/transformations with built-in CDNs is one of the more common solutions you would find out there but can get pretty expensive and locked in over time.

Vercel is a good example that provides a built-in “next/image” solution for the NextJS framework that optimises images for better performance, however, it gets very expensive as you scale.

Alternatively, running your own service with one of the most common image processing libraries like SharpJS is great but can get pretty difficult to run in a serverless environment with CDNs and all the other bells and whistles alongside all your other code while the cold startup time of Sharp in a serverless environment can be pretty brutal.

With all the growth around rebuilding engines in Rust for performance gains, I thought there must be an image processing library written in Rust which could be compiled to WebAssembly (WASM) and run way faster. That’s when I discovered Photon https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon by Silvia, who has done amazing work with the library.

This eventually led me to discover https://github.com/fineshopdesign/cf-wasm/tree/main/packages... that has already transcribed the Photon package into a WASM binary for easy use in edge v8 environments like Cloudflare workers or NextJS Edge functions.

Using these packages I built an API layer on the NextJS framework allowing you to easily process local and remote images at blazing fast speeds with a bunch of helper functions making it similar to use as most paid Image processing APIs. If hosted on Vercel, you can make use of the built-in CDN cache for files less than 10 MB at no extra charge with Edge caching.

Some of the features:

- Blazing fast image processing

- Fully serverless, runs on Vercel Edge functions

- Resize, crop, compress, tint, rotate, format and more

- Global distribution with Edge functions

- Automated CDN cache with Edge functions

- Replacement for `next/image` processing on Vercel

- Local and remote image processing

Some problems:

- The Photon lib has last been updated in 2020

- There are still a few obvious bugs when using it for more advanced requirements like 8k image processing on edge function due to poor memory management in Rust

- No sexy features right now like AI image optimisation and selective background blurring

- If you are looking for an all-in-one solution with Image Storage + image processing/CDN, this is not it (something we will be releasing soon on JigsawStack.com)

I think the Photon library and the API have a lot more potential for growth and will be hoping for more contributions from the community as Rust gets more popular!

My first implementation was based on photon_rs, a Rust based web assembly library for image processing. It worked pretty well, but it was slower than OP website. Without digging much it seems logical since photon isn’t optimized for performance.

What you describe reminded me of photon. Check out the website. If there isn't an overlap of functionality then you can definitely integrate it into your own site.

For the image, you are able to either use your webcam to take a photo, or upload a photo of your own before moving onto the filters. Image filtering is included in most image manipulation libraries. I had used ImageMagick before, but had a terrible time with it. I wanted to find a better way to do Instagram-like filtering. I came across Photon, a high performance image processing library written in Rust and can be compiled to WebAssembly, and there was already a React demo so it was easy to integrate. Once you choose the filter you want, you move onto the decoration stage.

I think it's likely the size is in the images - could you possibly call something like jpegoptim on the images as part of the build phase?

Maybe invoke jpegoptim as a subprocess, since it does lossless optimization of JPEG compression and I don't know of any crates that do that for JPEG.