November 3, 2023
imgproxy Pro helps Product-Live streamline retail image management
Product-Live, a platform that helps suppliers and retailers exchange rich product information, went on a quest to find a new image processing solution to accommodate their growing customer base—and embraced imgproxy Pro. We asked their CTO to explain the "why" behind this choice.
In a modern digital-first retail landscape, images are more than just pixels; they're crucial selling points. Product-Live makes creating, managing and exchanging image listings with retailers a trivial task for many successful brands that now rely on the platform to put their products in both online and brick-and-mortar stores.
"We wanted to offer our customers a basic solution for image processing that we could improve over time, with at least the following functionalities: image resizing, conversion into different basic formats and quality adjustment", says Clément Aubert, CTO of Product-Live.
The criteria for picking a product to replace the aging Python-based image processing pipeline were simple: a well-maintained solution that receives regular updates and that is easy to deploy and manage in production. It also had to be performant and scalable to deal with the fast-growing volume of media: in just one month Product-Live has processed 4 million images with peaks of up to 1000 images per second and those numbers are expected only to grow.
The ease of deployment, the quality of documentation, and the performance of the solution made imgproxy Pro our choice.
In the fast-paced world of retail tech, no one can afford even a slightest downtime—luckily, the transition from Thumbor to imgproxy Pro went as smoothly as one would expect from a simple container-based tool. "Deployments are immediate and without issues," Aubert notes. This was largely thanks to imgproxy working naturally with the existing Kubernetes setup, allowing for easy management and scalability.
While the immediate needs were met, the flexibility of imgproxy Pro promises future applications. "We've started offering PDF manipulation and are exploring imgproxy Pro's object detection features," adds Aubert. The possibility of classifying product data sheets automatically is an exciting prospect that could further streamline Product-Live's operations.
From the operations point of view, imgproxy Pro also ticks all the boxes: "It works. It’s lightweight. It can be monitored. It’s documented. It ain’t much but it’s enough," summarizes the DevOps Principal Engineer at Product-Live.
In solving a specific but crucial issue, imgproxy Pro has allowed Product-Live to better focus on their core mission. "In the future, we want to use imgproxy capabilities to deduce metadata from images like the dominant color or to classify an image based on its content," concludes Aubert.
By addressing the tangible pain points around image management, imgproxy Pro has already proved itself to be not just a tool, but a partner enabling Product-Live to achieve their mission more effectively.
Are you facing similar challenges with image management as Product-Live did? Consider imgproxy Pro. It enabled Product-Live to transition seamlessly and improve their efficiency. Our solution is flexible and scalable, allowing you to concentrate on your core operations while we take care of your image processing needs.
