A Lightweight, Open-Source Upgrade for Your Image CDN

If you’ve ever integrated images into a web project, you know the drill: upload, resize, optimize, deliver. Services like Imgix and Cloudinary are fantastic, but sometimes you want more control, lower costs, or just a simpler, self-hosted alternative. What if you could keep the powerful on-the-fly image transformations without the vendor lock-in or the hefty price tag?

Enter Kriti Images. It’s a lightweight, open-source image processing server that acts as a drop-in upgrade for your existing image CDN workflow. Think of it as giving your static image storage a superpower—the ability to resize, compress, and convert images on the fly with a simple URL-based API.

What It Does

Kriti Images is a Go-based server that sits in front of your image storage (like an S3 bucket or a local directory). You send it a URL with parameters (e.g., https://images.yourdomain.com/photo.jpg?w=800&h=600&format=webp), and it fetches the original image, applies the transformations, caches the result, and serves it back. It handles the common stuff: resizing, cropping, format conversion, and optimization, all through a clean, predictable API.

Why It's Cool

The clever part is in its simplicity and focus. It’s not trying to be a full-blown digital asset management system. It’s a single, stateless service that does one job well: processing images on demand. This makes it easy to deploy, scale, and integrate.

You can run it anywhere—on a small VPS, in a container, or even on the edge—and it works with the storage you already have. Because it’s open-source, you can tweak it, audit it, or extend it if you need a custom filter or transformation. It removes the mystery (and the monthly bill) from the image processing pipeline.

How to Try It

The quickest way to see it in action is to check out the GitHub repository. It includes a detailed README with configuration options and a Docker Compose setup to get you running locally in minutes.

1. Head over to the repo: github.com/kritihq/kriti-images
2. Clone it, and use the provided docker-compose.yml to spin up the server and a sample storage backend.
3. Point it at your own S3 bucket or local folder, and start transforming images with URL parameters.

It’s that straightforward. No complex provisioning or API keys needed for a local test.

Final Thoughts

Kriti Images is a solid tool for developers who want the convenience of a dynamic image CDN but value control and cost-efficiency. It’s perfect for side projects, internal tools, or even production applications where you want to own the entire stack. If you’ve been looking for a way to decouple your images from a proprietary service without building a processor from scratch, this is a fantastic place to start. Give it a star, run the demo, and see if it fits your workflow.

Follow for more cool projects: @githubprojects