Image resizing on the fly in asp.net

Question

For simplicity lets say that I have a web page that needs to display thumbnails of images. The images locations are stored in a database(the images are stored on Amazon S3).

Answer 1

Every tutorial on this topic over-simplifies the situation and nearly all of them leak memory. It's a long read, but you should know about the 29 image resizing pitfalls so you can avoid them.

I wrote a library to do server-side dynamic image resizing safely. It's not something that can be done properly in 1 tutorial or even 10. You can solve 80% of the bugs, but not 100%. And when you're doing something this resource-intensive, you can't tolerate bugs or memory leaks.

The core library is free and open-source, but the Amazon S3 plugin is part of the Performance edition, which has a $249 license fee. The Performance Edition comes with source, examples, and documentation for S3, MS SQL, Azure, MongoDB GridFS, and CloudFront integration, as well as terabyte-scale disk caching and memcaching.

From the statistics I have access to, it appears that imageresizing.net is the most widely-used library of its kind. It runs at least 5 social networks and is used with image collections as large as 20TB. Most large sites use the S3 plugin, as local storage (or even a SAN) isn't very scalable.