One area where we get a lot of questions is around purging images. Although purging is a familiar concept to anyone who has previously worked with Content Delivery Networks, or indeed any distributed system that needs to sync data between nodes, the concept is not the most intuitive, and every purge system functions differently. New users sometimes have an incomplete understanding of the purge process, and that can lead to confusion when the system performs differently than expected. For that reason, we thought some clarity around how image purges work in imgix would prove helpful.

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One of imgix’s core values is giving our customers flexibility in their image storage. We believe you shouldn’t have to move your images onto another storage system to take advantage of our imaging infrastructure, which is why we offer multiple ways to connect to them where they already live.

Our existing Amazon S3, Web Folder, and Web Proxy solutions cover a wide swath of our customers’ needs, and we’ve now added support for the Google Cloud Storage™ service as well, a much-requested option.

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The imgix team just came back from Los Angeles, where we attended and sponsored a booth at NRF’s Shop.org conference, focused on e-commerce with this year’s theme: “This Is Digital”.

In line with the theme, current and near-future technologies were the focus at the conference. It was hard to pass a session or booth without hearing about the wonders of machine learning and what it can do with your mountain of customer data, or seeing the now-cliche scene of someone in a VR headset, mouth agape, wandering a digital version of a store.

And there are really incredible things happening tech-wise that will alter the face of e-commerce and retail in general. Disney shared how they’re leveraging customer data to create custom experiences online for customers that increase engagement and hopefully drive conversions. Instead of static websites that are the same for every visitor, you might encounter one of the many iterations of the Disney website based on your browsing history, purchasing decisions, etc.

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Note: New in our series of guest posts, Unsplash cofounder Luke Chesser describes how they use imgix to run their popular photography community. (Reposted from their blog with permission)

One of the challenges of working with visual media online is that the landscape is always changing, but not every change is immediately relevant. A promising new image format might not be supported widely enough to adopt—until the largest device maker in the world adopts it and suddenly it is.

Part of imgix's goal is to handle this complexity so our customers don't have to. That's why we're pleased to announce support for the High Efficiency Image File Format (commonly known as HEIF or HEIC) at the same time it becomes the standard storage format for images in iOS 11.

imgix customers will be able to ingest HEIC images natively and perform our full suite of operations on them, including transcoding and serving them in any of the 11 output formats we support. There are no changes necessary to take advantage of this—all imgix parameters will just work on HEIC images without modification. This will be especially useful to customers who deal with user-generated content—iOS 11 users’ photos will display correctly even if they’re uploaded in the new format, which is currently unsupported by most browsers.

If you have any questions about HEIC, please reach out to your account rep or drop us a line at support@imgix.com.

Online publications tell important stories, and visuals are the vehicle driving those stories forward. The popular website Upworthy harnesses the power of viral content for good, creating visual stories that spread across social media as a way to raise awareness of important issues. The site generates over 50 million pageviews each month, but is maintained by a team of just six engineers.

Succeeding at such a massive scale with a small team has meant being smart and scrappy. The Upworthy dev team has a motto: focus on little things that have a huge impact. When they began searching for ways to boost metrics and streamline editorial processes, they noticed that image handling was coming up again and again. When a page was underperforming, a poorly-optimized image was usually involved. Pages loaded slowly because images were too large, or else the visual design of the page would be marred by overly-compressed imagery.

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