Updates from our Product Team.

Here at ImageEngine, we’re dedicated to pushing the boundaries of image delivery and ensuring that you and your customers can get the most out of your website with device-specific experiences. This year, we’ve worked hard on improvements and new features to make image delivery faster, leaner, and more optimized for your end users. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on with you.

We’ve enhanced our image optimization algorithm.

Google’s web.dev team praised ImageEngine in their image tooling report as one of the leading CDN providers for image performance and delivery! What makes us stand out among our competitors is our unique Automated Psychovisual Optimization algorithm, which results in better visual results – a real game-changer in optimizing images while maintaining their quality and integrity. We’ve recently improved our algorithm to be even more precise, especially for mobile devices and browsers. 

Better support for client hints.

Our image optimization algorithm leverages mobile device detection to make ImageEngine the most powerful CDN for image delivery. But did you know that our image optimization algorithm also supports user-agent client hints sent by Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Samsung Internet, Opera, and more?

We are committed to image optimization and actively ensure we stay up-to-date with the latest web technologies. To that end, we support client hints sent by Chromium-based browsers, which provide us with detailed knowledge about the user, such as connection type. This allows us to optimize image delivery even further, reducing image size by up to 50% for users on slow networks!

Depending on your traffic patterns, you can expect a better visual quality to file size ratio (high visual quality, low byte size) thanks to these updates.

Set a max pixel ratio.

Our amazing eyes can spot a lot — but it turns out even the most eagle-eyed among us have their limits. Research shows that our vision isn’t sharp enough to detect differences in high-resolution images on super high-definition screens.

Now, you can cap the DPR on any image using the max DPR feature in the ImageEngine settings. If you’re using high-resolution origin images, we recommend setting the maximum DPR to 2 for most uses.

Max DPR is also available as a directive.

By the way, settings now also work for prefixed image URLs!

Leverage next-gen image formats.

We are proud to support both AVIF and HEIC as origin formats. By leveraging ImageEngine, you can take advantage of next-generation formats easily because we automatically convert your image formats if your end user’s browser doesn’t support the origin format. This ensures visitors access the best quality device-specific experiences every time they visit your site.

Good news for web developers: you can now include AVIF in the chain of possible output formats. But before jumping on board, remember that this format isn’t quite ready for widespread adoption due to current issues with poor visual quality, long encoding/decoding times, and low byte savings.

Connect your Wasabi buckets.

You can now connect your Wasabi buckets as an origin to ImageEngine using the S3:// protocol! When creating a new engine or origin, choose “S3 (Wasabi)” from the protocol dropdown.

New directives = more control.

We’ve developed a new “fit method.” “m_outside” will resize the image to be as small as possible while ensuring its dimensions are greater than or equal to both width and height.

We’ve also added a directive that will force the browser to download the image rather than display it in the browser window. Add “dl_true” to the directives list in the query string.

Audit request headers.

We’ve added support for a request header “imgeng-audit: true” so that it is easier to understand how ImageEngine optimized a given image. Information about image pixel size, byte size, payload reduction, cache status, and more is available in the response when the imgeng-audit header is set.

Additional updates to our plugins.

Get the best out of ImageEngine with our updated plugins for WordPress, Shopware, and Magento! These helpful plugins automatically enable relevant client hints to ensure your images are optimized correctly. It’s never been easier or faster to deliver optimized online experiences.

Users can also enjoy the new feature of ImageEngine’s Gatsby plugin: built-in integration with Storyblok! Enjoy faster loading images and seamless experiences on every device. 

Whew – That’s a lot!

Until next time,

– The ImageEngine Product Team