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.

[1] - https://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

Why not use a service like http://www.imgix.com/ instead?

I need a way to do this in Apache and/or PHP.

I think Cloudfront has a way to pass variables to your server so theoretically you can use any image generation package right?