KLklaussilveira·Aug 21, 2025Submission
Imaginary: Fast HTTP microservice for high-level image processing
1 points · Open discussionh2non
imaginary
Go2017–2025
h2non / imaginary
imaginary
Fast, simple, scalable, Docker-ready HTTP microservice for high-level image processing
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Fast, simple, scalable, Docker-ready HTTP microservice for high-level image processing
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-06-22 15:34:14 UTC to 2025-08-21 17:31:30 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesindeed! most image processing golang services suggest/use jemalloc
the top 3 from https://github.com/topics/resize-images (as of 2025-06-13)
imaginary: https://github.com/h2non/imaginary/blob/1d4e251cfcd58ea66f83...
imgproxy: https://web.archive.org/web/20210412004544/https://docs.imgp... (linked from a discussion in the imaginary repo)
imagor: https://github.com/cshum/imagor/blob/f6673fa6656ee8ef17728f2...
In Jemalloc PostmortemThere is also battle-tested imaginary tool [1], offering similar functionality and much more, also using libvips
[1] https://github.com/h2non/imaginary
In Imagor: A fast, Docker-ready image processing server written in GoThere is some overlap with CloudFlare Workers. The big, practical difference is that you can put apps on fly.io that abuse CPUs, write to disk, accept TCP traffic, etc.
Most people we've worked with want to run run apps they've already written (or open source like https://github.com/h2non/imaginary).
In Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your usersA missing piece of (valuable) documentation would be handling cache scenarios for how you'd mutate a response based on user-agent or accept headers - say, changing file format.
I personally do client hints polyfilling via workers (dpi matters for things like "fit" even if you use srcset) and transpose images off-workers (github.com/h2non/imaginary). Will do testing and see how they match up in terms of quality.
In Cloudflare Image Resizing: Simplifying Optimal Image DeliveryAm I able to give an arbitrary URL to an image for processing/display in the browser? I’ve been using a self hosted option called Imaginary [0] but am getting tired of self hosting it.
[0] https://github.com/h2non/imaginary
In Essential Image OptimizationShortlist:
- Apache Tika + Tesseract for OCR of mails - i hate physical paper
- SOLR to index the output of the above mentioned data
- Imaginary (https://github.com/h2non/imaginary) for image pre-processing of the scanned mails / documents. Its much more lightweight than imagemagick.
- Openhab2 for home-automation
In Ask HN: Which self-hosted solutions are you using?https://github.com/h2non/imaginary appears to support quality/compression settings.
In Ask HN: Best Self-Hosted, Server-Side Image Optimization Tools?