silvia-odwyer

photon

Rust2019–2025

silvia-odwyer / photon

photon

⚡ Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

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4Distinct people

4Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

3.9KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

⚡ Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

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.

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 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 year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-12-16 19:43:16 UTC to 2025-04-10 13:43:01 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

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	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	1	1	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

Youden·Apr 10, 2025

That's some pretty aggressive editorializing in the title. The linked page doesn't once use "faster", "VIPS" or "PIL". The page does link to benchmarks [0] but Photon isn't the clear victor. It's slower on the PNG benchmark but faster on the JPG benchmark. There are no benchmarks for PIL. It's an interesting project but the differentiating factor is more portability and security than speed. WASM means that this can be run in a nice sandbox where its ability to harm the system is drastically reduced. [0]: https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon/wiki/Benchmarks

In Photon: Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

yoeven·Apr 4, 2024Submission

Show HN: OS Image processing API running on edge functions using Rust and WASM

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, while it does make it convenient, it can get pretty expensive over time and has limited functionality. 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

Read the rest

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!

1 points · Open discussion

Idered·Nov 1, 2022Submission

Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

23 points · Open discussion

silvi9·Dec 16, 2019

I've been developing a WebAssembly image processing library, and its performance has greatly surpassed JavaScript's, allowing for much faster and more performant image processing on the web. I'm excited to see how I can improve upon it in the future, and make it even faster! It's on GitHub here, any feature requests or suggested improvements would be greatly appreciated too: https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon

In WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation