Fun Links 2015-11-27

Today my links are for various image/document services each of which fills slightly different needs.

Cloudinary
http://cloudinary.com/
A cloud image/video service that provides storage and CDN hosting in addition to manipulation all with API access. You can send files to it from your web apps directly from the browser, no need to deal with storing end user uploads yourself. You can have it perform various manipulations as well, including face detection for thumbnail creation. It can even fetch your users’ profile pictures from some common sites. Offers a very generous free tier. I’ve been using Cloudinary myself for a short time to experiment with hosting images for my blog. The UI is full featured, but I would say a bit clunky. I can’t argue with the value though.

ImgIX
https://www.imgix.com
ImgIX is an image processing service that allows you to deliver device-specific and manipulated images very quickly. They don’t host the images directly; those would come from a location you provide (S3, public web location, etc.). They also don’t seem to have a free tier, which is unfortunate for any hobby sites/applications.

Smallpdf
http://smallpdf.com/
Smallpdf, as the name suggests, deals with PDF files. They provide online services to compress, split, merge, unlock and convert PDF files. I used their compress tool to optimize a 1.1 MB PDF into a 58 KB file. Impressive. They don’t seem to have an API, you need to drag and drop files onto their pages, but the site looks and works smoothly, and the whole process is very easy. This probably won’t replace Acrobat if you are doing serious PDF work, but if you need the occasional PDF compressed or converted, then this tool is a great resource.