Image optimization at the edge

It’s almost certain you had to get yourself familiar with workflows and renditions if you’ve been doing AEM long enough. It doesn’t take long to realise it can become a huge can of worms - bulky workflows that can get stuck at random stage of processing, ton of renditions to support or components with hardcoded original asset references. And if you finally wrapped your head around it, a new set of requirements appears in the backlog:

• modern image format support (WebP)
• “some of the images we uploaded may have EXIF data and we’d like to remove it. Sounds doable?”
• “90% quality level is slightly too high. Can we reduce it to 82% for all the images we uploaded so far please?”
• “is it possible to render a small overlay on top of every image from this DAM directory?”
• and the list goes on…

Adobe offers you some solutions to cover workflows and renditions (offloading, Dynamic Media aka Scene7), but is this the only way? What if you can meet most (if not all) of those requirements without a single change in your AEM codebase?

During this talk I’d like to walk you through Image Optimizer journey and present the outcome of its rollout in one of my recent projects.