Despite being a voice and text chat app, Discord sees over a hundred million images passing through its tubes every day. While we wish it was as simple as sending them out across the tubes to your friends, delivering these images creates some pretty large technical problems. Linking directly to images would leak users’ IP addresses to image hosts, and large images use up lots of bandwidth. To circumvent these problems, Discord needs an intermediary service to fetch images on behalf of users and then resize them to reduce bandwidth usage.


https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-resizes-150-million-images-every-day-with-go-and-c-c9e98731c65d

The tl;dr

We should all be automating our image compression.

In 2017, image optimization should be automated. It's easy to forget, best practices change, and content that doesn't go through a build pipeline can easily slip. To automate: Use imagemin or libvips for your build process. Many alternatives exist.

Most CDNs (e.g. Akamai) and third-party solutions like Cloudinary, imgix, Fastly's Image Optimizer, Instart Logic's SmartVision or ImageOptim API offer comprehensive automated image optimization solutions.

The amount of time you'll spend reading blog posts and tweaking your configuration is greater than the monthly fee for a service (Cloudinary has a free tier). If you don't want to outsource this work for cost or latency concerns, the open-source options above are solid. Projects like Imageflow or Thumbor enable self-hosted alternatives.

https://images.guide/