Some of imgix's most powerful features, like watermarks and multiline text, require passing in a URL or a text string as the value of a parameter. For these parameters, we've recommended that both URLs and strings be URI-encoded.
Today we're announcing Base64 encoding support for these parameters, to ensure that they resolve correctly even when nested several levels deep. This makes doing complex composting with imgix more reliable and easier to implement.
Standardizing user-generated content like user avatars and for-sale photos can be a time sink and a hit to page load times. Learn how to use imgix to manage and enhance the images your users provide, so their content and your products look better and load faster.
Overlaying text on images is a design pattern with a long history, from protective watermarks to funny internet memes. As social media and personalized user experiences become more important across all web platforms, dynamically combining words and imagery is a powerful but complex feature to implement, and crucial to many products.
Learn how to easily create compelling text/imagery combinations in our Typesetting Endpoint tutorial.
For e-commerce sites, both page speed and large, detailed images are key to successful conversions. You want to provide an enjoyable, engaging experience for your customers without slowing them down. So what's an online store developer to do?
To make implementing fast lightboxes and zoom viewers simpler, today we're pleased to announce Luminous and Drift. These open-source libraries are the first in a series of user interface components we'll release this year to make using imgix as straightforward and easy to integrate as possible.
Lightboxes and zoom viewers bridge the speed gap by allowing your customers to view a more detailed image as desired. However, if they're implemented in ways that don't take image size and number of image requests into account, the potential speed savings will be lost. For example, scaling down a large image to make a thumbnail saves on image requests, but slows down page speed because the browser is forced to scale the image.
imgix can improve any lightbox or zoom viewer by eliminating the need for multiple copies of the image and delivering it at high quality and speed in all sizes, boosting both page speed and conversion.3
As websites and web applications expand their visual richness and functionality, optimizing for page speed becomes more critical. Fingerprinting your image files can help ensure that your caching strategy and purging are optimal. Find out how to develop a caching strategy with fingerprinting and use it with imgix.
By architecting the site to use imgix from the beginning, Exposure has been able to take advantage of best practices right away. To keep more image sizes cached, they create derivative images in increments of 100 pixels, and then adjust to the exact size needed from these smaller versions.
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