Managing images and all the many different sizes needed for different devices can be a constant task for many web managers and developers. When you first start out with your shiny new website or blog it might be enough to use one of the online image compressor services and you will be fine but at some point you will realize when the size of your images folder grows that perhaps you need to find another way to manage and deal with your websites images. Thankfully there are many services that can help you tame your website images and make it easier to deal with them as your website needs grow, but be ready to have to pay, since the processing power and bandwidth isn’t free.

Cloudflare Images

If you are already using Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, web firewall or any other services it might be the best to also integrate the Cloudflare Images into your image management. As of this writing Cloudflare Images is an addon that you can purchase starting at $5.00 USD/month. This will allow you to store, resize and optimize images. Cloudflare Images can be confusing in some ways, because there is the image dashboard you can access, upload and create variants on the Cloudflare website, but there is also and Image Resizing feature that you can use simply by signing up and using a custom URL to serve a resized image. As much as I like Cloudflare, they have this tendency to create tools that are really only useful if you are an API developer. That being said I have used the Cloudflare image resizing and it is probably the easiest part of Cloudflare Images and if you have control of your images might be the easiest way to integrate Cloudflare Images into your website.

That being said if you use WordPress there is no official Cloudflare Images WordPress plugin but there is a WordPress plugin created by Anton Vanyukov that you could try.

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is one of the first companies I heard of that does image resizing and optimization. They actually offer a free account so you can easily give them a test drive before jumping right in and paying them. Paid plans start at $99.00/month if you pay monthly, but if you want to pay yearly you can get a bit of a discount at $89.00/month paid yearly. The dashboard is pretty straight forward if you want to use their website to manage your images and to create variations. They also provide many different ways to integrate them into your site no matte what your level of coding level is.

If you use WordPress they do have an official plugin created by Cloudinary so you might want to check that out if your website is powered by WordPress.

Cloudimage

Cloudimage also offers a free plan, but make sure you have an email address attached to your domain in order to sign up. Paid plans start at $29.00/month. It always makes me nervous seeing fees for GB bandwidth overuse fees, so you are forewarned that if you run a popular site or a post with one of the images host by them gets popular you might end up with a bigger bill than you expect. I tried signing up but was never able to validate my account. It certainly looks like you can just use an image URL to resize and transform your images, that is the impression I get from the documentation.

They do offer a number of plugins for developers and for WordPress users they have an official plugin to take advantage of.

Sirv

Free accounts are available with paid accounts starting at $19.00/month. They also offer a yearly paid plan that works out to $17.42/month, so a small discount if you pay yearly. I was easily able to create a free account and used one of their sample images to create an image tag to embed here. You can see it below. If the image is not loading it is possible I went over my free account limit.

This is the first service that I have come across with a demo video. I will embed it below.

Like many other image resizing services Sirv also offers an official WordPress plugin you can use if your CMS is WordPress.

ImageKit

ImageKit offers a forever free plan with paid plans starting at $49.00/month. Certainly more pricey than some of the other services.

It took a little time but between looking at the documentation and grabbing the sample image I was able to resize a sample image through a URL. I probably should have just watched the demo video, it would have been faster.

I will say it is not as elegant as some other services but I am sure it would be easier if you used the service everyday.

ImageKit also offers an official WordPress plugin, but they also have plugins for Shopify, Magento and several other platforms.

Uploadcare

Offers a free forever plan with paid plans appearing to start at $20.00/month. Image transforming is as simple as modifying the URL of an image from Uploadcare files and then adding the image URL to an image tag. Like the image below.

The interface gives you the basics and you can easily modify the settings using the URL.

The Youtube video walks you through it pretty quickly and before you know it you can be using the service to resize and modify your images on the fly from Uploadcare.

The WordPress plugin can be found in the WordPress Plugin directory if you are using WordPress.

Gumlet

Free forever plans are available with paid plans starting at $99.00/month. Seems to be more focused on video than images from my browsing. Setup is more complicated that simply uploading images and resizing them based on URL parameters so I was not able to actually test any actual images. Their Youtube channel only has one video focused on video and had no real information I was looking for on image resizing. My impression is if you are doing video Gumlet might be more for you.

Upload

No free accounts at Upload, but prices start at $7.00/month. The website documentation shows how to do image resizing and other transformation by adjusting the URL.

Publitio

Offers a free plan and starts at $9.00/month and appears to offer a range of services from audio, video and image management. I was able to easily upload an image since they offered no samples to test after uploading though it appeared to be a bit of a mystery on how to perform URL resizing. I just happened to click the version link to see versions and find a URL to the image with URL resizing. I did note that when I created a new URL for the image below it created a new version available on that page.

They offer two WordPress plugins, and honestly I am not sure which one you would need to use for dynamic image resizing, Publitio Offloading or Publitio.

LibPixel

Starts with an on-demand pricing at $15.00/month. They make a point of showing an image api to create custom resized or modified images. Their documentation has several examples on how to create image urls once you have an account.

Overall

It can be daunting to go through all of these services to find the one that will suit you and your websites needs. I only did very cursory looks at all of these services. If you are considering purchasing a subscription for a cloud based image resizing and optimization service you should spend some time to identify exactly what your website needs are and find the service that best fits your requirements.

At my fulltime work we use Cloudflare Images, the main reason is because we did not have to upload the images to Cloudflare to be able to resize the images to the sizes we needed. The images are still hosted on our own storage but resized using a URL. The other reason we decided on Cloudflare images was simply reach. The Cloudflare CDN was just larger and faster to cache the images closer to our readers.