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thumbor
thumbor
Python2013–2023
thumbor / thumbor

thumbor

thumbor is an open-source photo thumbnail service by globo.com

15Distinct people
18Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
10.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

thumbor is an open-source photo thumbnail service by globo.com

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I recommend Thumbor if you want the advanced manipulation and smart cropping features common in the hosted services: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

manigandham used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

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, 3:56:07 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 year18 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-06-19 18:04:25 UTC to 2023-04-11 19:41:09 UTC.

02462013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

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.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

18 sources
I think one reason is that image resizing algorithms are nontrivial. An image uploader sounds simple enough until you start supporting many different scaling algorithms [1] across a bunch of formats. Browsers are already big and complex enough IMO. This could be easily / best handled by a library instead. Another point is that holding onto the unmodified images server-side (and merely serving a cached, resized, optimized version on the fly) can be beneficial for future use cases. Check out, e.g., Thumbor [2] if you're curious to see more of the complexities involved. I have self-hosted it for a company before, and it worked well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling [2]: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor
In Ask HN: Why have browsers not provided a client solution for image scaling yet?
I'm a bit surprised there's no mention of image optimization proxy / services like thumbor[0] (which is open source). Instead of pre-processing all your images, it lets you worry about it later. You can compose different transformations and filters (e.g. add a watermark, resize, crop etc). This is especially useful when things on the website change. It lets you keep the original at full size, and transform them as you need. There are some commercial services in this space, as well as other similar open source services. If you're looking for a quick way to get thumbor up and running with docker, I'd plug https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor [0] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor
In Image optimization decreased website's page weight by 62%
We were using imgix for a while and were generally happy, but things started go downhill and some point, or so it felt anyway. Their support was always a bit opaque. And the service itself didn't evolve (as far as rendering. E.g. Composing more than one of the same filter wasn't really possible... for example adding two watermarks). We've also had issues with CORS headers that weren't resolved and our end users couldn't get images some times... We switched to host our own thumbor (open source), and couldn't be happier. We pay around a quarter or less than before (even with failover in place) as well. We really wanted to use a hosted service. We're not keen on hosting stuff out of our core business. But in this case it just didn't work out. EDIT: link to Thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor
In How We Are Improving Performance
It can be easily implemented as a filter[1][2]. If you need to use it via command-line you can save the current buffer as a tempfile[3], call your CLI with the tempfile path and read the tempfile to use as the new buffer. It's even simpler if your CLI can take a stdin argument, since you can just pass the buffer as a stdin parameter. Thumbor's filter infrastructure allows you to change the image incrementally. [1] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/wiki/Brightness [2] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/blob/master/thumbor/filte... [3] https://docs.python.org/2/library/tempfile.html
In Show HN: Thumbor – open-source on-demand image cropping, resizing, and filters
There's also thumbor (https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor). It's a very mature implementation of this type of server and has been very battle-tested (https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/wiki/Who%27s-using-it). At globo.com we have near a billion images (we are a big portal). Can you imagine pre-generating that many images every time a new format gets added? We serve everything with thumbor with a Varnish cache in front of it and we're very happy with it. It has enabled our designers to work with any image size they can think of. If you guys need more info, please check thumbor's docs: https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor/wiki/
In OpenRoss – fast, scalable, on-demand image resizer
See also thumbor [1], it's been used and developed by the biggest news portal of Latin America. > thumbor is a smart imaging service. It enables on-demand crop, resizing and flipping of images. > It also features a VERY smart detection of important points in the image for better cropping and resizing, using state-of-the-art face and feature detection algorithms (more on that in Detection Algorithms). [1] https://github.com/globocom/thumbor
In Pilbox: an image resizing application server

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