Listen to this articleInterview with Slawomir Lisznianski Co-founder of Redid.
Q: What is Redid and how does it work?
A: In one line, Redid combines an automated image editor with a Content Distribution Network, to deliver pixel-perfect images, logos and controls.
Behind the scenes, imagine a massive catalog of graphic files in various formats, from bitmaps (PNG, WebP, JPEG) to vector formats like SVG. These files are owned by our users, similar to Google Drive or Dropbox. Beyond just storing the files though, Redid users can serve them with “transformation” instructions — which we call “profiles”. For example, today web developers and designers need to create several versions of the same image to accommodate various resolutions, photo.jpg, photo_2x.jpg etc. With Redid, you only upload one file (the highest resolution you have), and let Redid deliver the size that matches the characteristics of the display device.
Next time you take a selfie you can rely on Redid to deliver one format to your buddy with a smartphone (small), another format to a girlfriend with a 7″ tablet (medium) and another format to your mom’s high-res Retina display (large). You don’t waste anyone’s bandwidth and the results are simply astonishing. The same applies to logos or UI elements, where Redid accepts SVG or 9-patch for rendering pixel-perfect results.
The reverse is also possible. If your website allows users to upload images, just rely on Redid to handle that for you and your server won’t see the heavy traffic. While the load on your infrastructure remains very low it’s also secure; your visitors cannot upload images you don’t approve thanks to our lightweight anti-CSRF mechanism.
Q: How long did it take to put it together and what was technically the most challenging part ?
A: Redid went through two phases. The original idea was born over 5 years ago while working on a “furniture website”. We constantly kept changing images and felt this was a nuisance. In less than two weeks, we put together a C++ server with ImageMagic handling all our transformations. It worked really great and saved us a lot of time. More recently, we needed a more scalable solution for a couple of projects, including serving student photos and assets for an online game. We deal with large number of photos and formats change all the time, depending on where it’s displayed. This time, we took it to the cloud and built for any peak load. This is the version that we are testing now and will offer to our users.
The most challenging part? There are many technologies and service providers involved. Getting all these to play friendly with each other and expose a unified service is somewhat difficult.
Q: When do you plan to launch it?
A: Our goal is to wrap up testing and open up in approximately 7 weeks time. Follow us @redidnet to get notified when our doors open!
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Our priority is to address feedback from (web) developers, graphic designers and providers, to ensure Redid meets their needs. After that we have a lot of ideas, from offering more complex transformations and filters to possible migration to GPUs, offloading image manipulations.
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