This is a post that I have been putting off for a while, but I think the time has come to share this with the community. Two years ago I sat down to start a new project, an experiment involving image downscaling and Node.js, and since then it has become my primary open-source project.

**I wanted to generate responsive images for my website to offer a better experience. **It came to life as a set of Node.js scripts, and over the course of several iterations, evolved into an open-source package released on npm under the name Responsive Image Builder.

It was created out of necessity due to a lack of existing open-source solutions.

Let me be clear, there are a variety of image tools, loaders, and third-party services. However, none of them, in my opinion, fulfilled my needs. Furthermore, I was in love with gatsby-image and the primitive library by Michael Fogleman (which was difficult to integrate into existing solutions).

This led me to create my own solution to solve my rather unique requirements:

• 🔥 Fast (obviously…)
• 💎 Best image algorithms (Lanczos3 😎)
• 🌁 Support beautiful SVG placeholders such as the primitive library
• 🙏 Simple
• OS-agnostic, free, parallelization, no network round-trips, no upscaling, …

My goal was to glue together existing image libraries into a unified toolset that could be customised to allow the processing of images in different ways.

Psst! You can read more about the motivation behind the project here.

Today it goes by a different name that better reflects its new functionality (and partly due to a reserved package scope ️🤦‍♂️): Image Processing Pipeline. The processing “workflow” is now completely customisable and it has also just had a major release that refactored the internals, making it easier to implement adapters, such as the new webpack loader!

#showcase #javascript #web-development #image #programming