About Thumbnailer¶
This document presents the vision of the Thumbnailer project, as shared by Authors and contributors.
Why thumbnailer?¶
Thumbnail generation is a feature often used on websites. As developers, we do not want:
- to install and configure thumbnail-related modules, again and again, on every project we start.
- to use a different solution for every framework we use to build a website.
- to deal with deployment.
- thumbnail generation to downgrade our overall website performance.
- increase server’s memory just to be able to perform operations on images.
Moreover, as internauts, we do not want:
- to manually edit images before we publish them.
- to install some image edition software just to create thumbnails.
That’s why we need a thumbnail generation service.
Some Alternatives exist, but Thumbnailer has the following valuable features:
- Open-source. It can be used to create a hosted thumbnail service (saas), but you are also free to deploy it on your own infrastructure if you want.
- Extensible. Create, plug and configure Engines, Writers and Readers.
- Full ecosystem. If you want to manage your own thumbnail generation service, Thumbnailer provides ready-to-use recipes, including thumbnail generation, serving, caching...
- Generate thumbnails out of almost any document. Input can be images, PDF files, HTML pages, ...
However, this version of is still a proof of concept: all features aren’t available yet.
Development status¶
Thumbnailer is under active development.
Currently, Thumbnailer project may contain parts of the ecosystem, so that it forms a product. Later, this project may be limited to the glue between ecosystem parts, these components being shipped as external projects.