Henry Bassey

6 min readJul 21 2025

How imgproxy quietly reshaped image infrastructure for engineers

“What if you could offload image resizing, not to some foreign cloud, but to a microservice under your full control? And what if that tool were completely language and framework-agnostic, meaning you could use it right away, no matter the stack? Meet imgproxy—a tool created exactly for these purposes.” — Sergei Aleksandrovich, Creator of imgproxy

There’s something rare about how the imgproxy team thinks.

They build with care, publish when it’s ready, and shape the product around what developers need in the long run. You might call it just engineering, but we call it stewardship. This is a quiet commitment to shipping tools that hold up over time.

Image handling often becomes a background task in fast-moving engineering teams. That’s where most pain hides. You want your images to be sharp, safe, lightweight, and fast. Served on every screen, cached properly, and scaled without waste.

But too often, the options are either bloated pipelines or restrictive services.

In 2017, the team at Evil Martians needed something better for themselves. Sergei Aleksandrovich started building a small server that could serve image variants on the fly, using libvips, behind a CDN, with predictable resource usage and a tight security model.

imgproxy became their default for client projects, quietly solving a persistent problem with a single binary.

It echoes William’s belief that good products start with internal needs. If they work well enough to keep, they’re worth sharing.

Eventually, they published it, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Imgproxy is shaped by daily engineering work

imgproxy grew by word of mouth, first in Martian projects, then across open-source communities, and eventually into production teams at Supabase, Algolia, Dribbble, Substack, and Photobucket.

Today, it has been downloaded over 23 million times via Docker. But the usage numbers are just one aspect that impresses us. The other is the way teams describe it:

“With imgproxy’s outstanding performance and reliability, we’ve simplified our processing pipeline, improved delivery performance across the platform, and experienced virtually zero image-related issues in three years.” — Jacob Bennett, Staff Software Engineer, Medium

It’s used in systems that serve billions of assets because it's fast, secure, and unobtrusive.

A product that grows by listening

“We’re living in a golden age of AI, and we’re not going to let imgproxy just sit and gather dust. … The most requested feature is background removal … We’re going to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of AI.” — Sergei Aleksandrovich

imgproxy Pro was shaped by what production teams were already building. Requests came in for background removal, better compression, video and PDF previews, smart format switching, and object detection. Each feature solved a specific workload. Each one shipped when ready.

The team also started simplifying the setup for large environments. First, with containerized deployments. Now, through AWS Marketplace, with GCP and Azure to follow.

Every addition has come from usage. imgproxy evolves in the same way it started: from inside the work.

How imgproxy fits into your production systems

imgproxy is used across a wide range of industries. Some examples:

• AI platforms converting large image batches into smaller, previewable versions
• Real estate marketplaces needing high-resolution, responsive property listings
• Social apps processing thousands of avatars or uploads per hour
• Developer-focused tools embedding dynamic images in docs, dashboards, or reports
• Retail and automotive platforms managing product images across mobile and web

“imgproxy solves the tedious task of optimizing every product image from eBay’s billions of listings. It only processes images that are requested, does it on completely the fly, and blazingly fast.” — Alexander Maltsev, ex-Head of Buyers Marketing, eBay

These are signs that imgproxy has become a foundational part of how modern platforms deliver media.

A voice worth amplifying

The product is solid. It’s already trusted inside platforms that serve millions of images every hour. It continues to evolve with new features, deeper integrations, and growing adoption across teams solving hard problems in AI, ecommerce, publishing, developer tooling, and more.

What's next?

The next phase is about showing how it all fits together. The authentic stories, the usage patterns, and the choices that engineering teams make when performance and control are critical.

We’re glad to support that journey and help more developers discover what imgproxy already makes possible.

The image infrastructure is ready. The story is just getting started. Try imgproxy and see what it can do for you, too.