Is anyone here working in a company that requires their app to host thousands or even millions of images on s3 or something similar? I’d love to chat about your challenges, I have an idea brewing but want to validate the problem first.

Is it a problem that you have or you anticipate?

Hey Romaric, It’s actually a problem my co-founder and I know how solve well from previous companies. We are trying to gauge if it’s a problem enough that others will pay us to solve it for them.

Oh ok, it makes sense to ask then 👍

What are the problems that are usually associated with such scale?

We hosted quite a number of photos at Yik Yak when I was there. It was a basic S3 upload / share via Cloudfront kinda stack with moderation triggers, etc.

We found CloudFront + S3 can get expensive fast when you need compute to resize images on the fly - at realestate.com.au we had crazy amounts of images that needed to be delivered at different aspect ratios, resolutions watermarking etc. With the volume we were doing it was cheaper to use EC2 over lambdas. Seems like the out of the box solutions are very expensive beyond a point and in some cases not as fast as as they need to be either. What’s not clear to me is if people needs something as fast and cost effective as we did. I’m working on an MVP to do it faster, cheaper and easy to configure and adopt, if anyone’s interested to give it a go let me know.

We were lucky in that we just shrank and resized once and served the much smaller file out to the feed. I imagine people selling there houses like their pictures in pretty high resolution so I can see your problem.

We serve millions of media content through GCS which is mostly images and some PDFs