History of the Image Resizer

The ImageResizer was created in January 2007 to simplify the process of changing website layouts and slideshow sizes. Resizing images manually was taking hours each day, so I decided to fix the problem with an HttpHandler.

The image resizer was designed with security, stability, and performance in mind from day 1. It was never a hack. It has always used proper memory (and resource) management techniques, and has leveraged disk caching to provide ideal scalability. It has always used .NET 2.0, and worked properly on XP through Windows 7 (and Server 2000 through 2008).

It has always been open-source, although I charged a 'download fee' for V1 and V2, which was the best way I could think of to fund development without restricting developer rights. I've also always had a no-questions-asked refund policy... Which only 1 person (of 400+ V2 users) ever took advantage of - and only because their project was cancelled. No V3 user has requested a refund yet.

I've always supported the product 100%, and I (believe) I have resolved every issue every user has sent me. Once I spent an entire week helping a user debug their application since they (incorrectly) suspected the ImageResizer of causing a memory leak. This issue ended up being caused by a different component.

I'm pretty sure this is better support that you can get anywhere else.

Release History

Version 1 was released to the public August 6, 2008 after 1.5 years of testing on several high-traffic sites.

Version 2 was a complete rewrite, and was released to users of v1 in January 2009, and was published in May 2009.

V2 introduced IIS7 support (HttpModule instead of HttpHandler design), and nice managed API, and support for Octree GIF quantization. And support for lots of other stuff. See the V2 changelog if you want details.

V2 was used by over 400 developers, integrated into roughly a dozen content management systems, and used by a couple of hosting companies.

After two years of improving V2, I realized that another rewrite was needed. I decided to maintain full compatibility with the V2 URL syntax, but the managed API needed an overhaul..

The goal of the v3 rewrite was to make everything open and extensible. v2 was a monolithic design that, while elegant and very concise, was hard to extend except through source code modification. V3 introduced the concept of Plugins, as well as adding an array of Events that can be used to customize the behavior of the pipeline. It also introduced a dedicated configuration section for the Resizer and its plugins.

V3 was released Apr. 24 after 4 months of coding and testing. Alpha 7 was released May 26, and I back-ported many bug fixes to V2 with the May 27, 2011 release of 2.8. A collection of pages on the V2 to V3 differences is available here.

The V3 core is under an MIT-like license. This license is much clearer than the V2 license (something I had lots of complaints and confusion about).

Some V3 plugins are under a slightly more restrictive license, but even those give you redistribution and sub-licensing rights. If your project needs a different license, contact me. I'm flexible about licensing, and I can probably get you what you need.

Interesting statistics

From Feb 2011 to December 2011, 889 commits were made to the project, an average of 3 per day. Each commit contains between 1 and 5 improvements to the project.
In 2011, 70% of support e-mails were answered in under 1 hour. Please note that roughly 30% of support e-mails arrive between 12am and 7am in my timezone.
V3.0 was downloaded 3,150 times between June 2011 and December 2011
Between June and December, 24 nuget packages for the ImageResizer were published. Nearly all plugins are nuget compatible.
The ImageResizer handles image processing for (several) photo album sites each containing 10-20TB of images.
Has been integrated into nearly every popular ASP.NET CMS with a CMS-specific plugin, yet doesn't actually need a CMS-specific plugin to be compatible with any of the CMSes..
Over 650 support questions were answered between August and December 2011