Thumbor and imgix seem nice products. I'm also working on another very similar product, http://thumbr.it/. I guess our main differentiator is that we also do thumbnails of documents and we allow the user to create their own effects on the photos. However, we don't have any of the text options available on imgix, or the smart crop that keeps faces in the image.
From a quick glance at Thumbor, it seems it also offers object detection (like faces), which is a nice add-on. Nice post, I didn't knew about this project, even though I'm working on the same space!
It's always encouraging to see others find similar solutions. I've been working on a asset management tool that dealt with thumbnail generation. Only I've done it in PHP.
First, I came across timthumb[1], but it was a little too heavy for my liking. Instead I whipped up a thumbnail-on-demand script with caching options in about 3 hours and 80 lines of code.
Now the best part -- I don't have to use a work-queue on the server side to offload thumbnailing. The browser will do that on first request, and results are cache from then on.
Cloudfront can vary objects by using a different uri stem, query params, or cookie contents. As noted in the article you can also route uri prefixs to your image sizer origin. So yes, I'd expect most image manipulation to be cachable using query strings for size/format/quality and a sane default for the base uri.
From a quick glance at Thumbor, it seems it also offers object detection (like faces), which is a nice add-on. Nice post, I didn't knew about this project, even though I'm working on the same space!