ImageKit: Weltbild

How Weltbild switched to a high-quality modular image delivery architecture with ImageKit, while reducing costs?

Weltbild is Germany's largest multi-channel media publisher and is a renowned book retail brand in Germany. It has now grown from selling books to one of the largest media & internet companies in Europe. It claims to be the No. 2 portal among online book retailers (presumably after Amazon.de). Weltbild employs around 6,400 employees and has a revenue of over 1.7 billion EUR in music and book sales. Weltbild was founded in 1948 as a small catholic publishing house and is now one of the leading media houses across Europe. Millions of customers are served through online storefronts, direct marketing, physical branches, and social networks. 

Problems to Solve

Being an online media company, Weltbild heavily relies on image content development and delivery. Since their venture into the online space, their operations grew exponentially in publishing and retail, but their image delivery systems were unable to match with the requirements due to the following problems;

1. Weltbild was using an outdated CDN and storage solution for their images. This was being used in their infrastructure for almost 7-8 years.

2. All of their images were stored in that solution. The CDN and the processing of images were also dependent on that solution. As Weltbild grew, this arrangement became increasingly risky and non-scalable as they had no control or access over their original images. They could only access images within the solution provider’s framework.

3. Image caching needed to be more efficient for every type of device as millions of users across Europe access Weltbild via different devices.

Expectations

Being a pioneer in online media trading, Weltbild wanted to optimize its omnichannel media publishing and purchase experience for all consumers and set new benchmarks. From social media to e-commerce, they wanted better integration of all sales channels and offer a complete multi-media experience for the 21st century

1. They wanted to move to a modular architecture, where each component in the image delivery process; The CDN, Image Optimization, and Storage of images, would be distinct. This way, they would have more control over their original images, giving them the flexibility to modify things when needed.

2. Technology has improved a lot in the last 7-8 years since Weltbild started using the image solution. They needed more cost-effective solutions that leveraged the best of advancements in image processing and delivery.

3. Image Quality was of great importance. They did not want to compromise on it just to implement a cheaper solution. The image should be compressed to the required sizes but the results should not come at the expense of its quality.

How ImageKit.io came into the picture

Given the 3 problems as stated above, Hubert Reid, a member of the Frontend Engineering team at Weltbild who has been actively involved in image optimization projects, started working on a viable plan to uplift their entire image workflow.

The first objective was to move the millions of images out from their old image solution provider’s storage system to a flexible AWS S3 storage system, that was under their control. 

Once this was done, the next step was to find an image optimization provider that can plug with their AWS S3 storage and deliver optimized or transformed images at high quality. The images were supposed to be delivered through their own CDN. 

ImageKit was the perfect fit, as the solution can adapt and fit into any company’s existing infrastructure in minutes, making it really simple to get started with. In this case, ImageKit integrated with Weltbild’s AWS S3 storage and CDN infrastructure, providing a superfast image optimization service. The output image renders from ImageKit were always at high-quality, even with all the continuous optimizations and compression happening. 

This helped in making the entire solution modular and scalable for the future of Weltbild, along with making it more cost-effective.

Details of how ImageKit is helping;

Real-Time Image Resizing & Optimization (with their own storage and CDN)

Weltbild shifted their entire image library to AWS S3. ImageKit natively integrates with S3 and the private buckets on S3, to provide real-time image optimization and resizing, along with other complex transformations. 

Once the image is fetched from the customer’s storage, it is processed in real-time. ImageKit stores a copy of the image for faster performance in the future while ensuring easy cache updates when needed. 

The image is then delivered via Weltbild’s CDN and gets cached in minutes. ImageKit’s team worked with the team at Weltbild to set up this integration with their CDN and conducted extensive testing as well.

Image Quality

Weltbild did not want to compromise on the image quality, which was a problem with their previous image provider. When they started evaluating ImageKit, it took some time to figure out the right image quality settings to apply. It also involved some new improvements from our end for better output quality.

The images were processed using features like image sharpening, image enhancements, and image resizing, along with using the right dimensions for device display. This enabled an unmatched output quality that was visually far superior compared to other solutions available in the market (Which were being evaluated by Weltbild).

The entire team approved of the image quality which made Weltbild even more sure about ImageKit’s capabilities.

A Cost-Effective Pricing Model

Reducing IT costs was also a major aim of this project. Since the entire architecture was now modularized, Weltbild wanted to go for solutions that would be more flexible and cost them based on the exact use of a particular component.

ImageKit bills customers only based on the final output size of the images optimized. It does not charge for the storage or the number of requests. For example, after resizing and optimization, if we deliver a 1MB image at 100KB size, then the customer is charged only for the 100KB output bandwidth. 

Named Transforms

One of the most interesting features for Weltbild has been the use of named transformations. It helps in extracting the complexities of the actual image transformation (to maintain quality, image sharpening is used along with resizing) from the developers and the users of the website.

ImageKit provides tons of resizing and cropping image transformations using URL parameters. This means that you can use ImageKit width and height resizing on the master image and can get the desired image size. It gets you an easier name to use and remember to refer to a particular transformation. The delinking also makes it easier to update new sizes if needed. For example, you are using a named transform in your code to resize the image to 300x200. Then, if the size changes to 400x300, you just have to update settings in the dashboard and not make any change to the code. 

A Reliable, Set & Forget System

During their evaluation, Weltbild also tried throwing in images that were actually in a different format than what was present in the URL. But ImageKit’s automatic format optimization setting worked correctly and delivered the right image every time.

There are a lot of new images that come from external sources every day. There is very little control over the incoming images. ImageKit works without causing any issues in delivering the right image every time and has been providing an uptime that is well above the 99.9% guaranteed SLA.

Conclusion

In Summary, the progress achieved by Weltbild using ImageKit and its custom services is as follows;

1. Automating entire image processing workflow with real-time resizing, compression, and aspect ratio transformation activities.

2. Integrate image processing and delivery with their AWS S3 storage and CDN infrastructure.

3. Set up a modular image workflow that costs only as per the use of particular components. (CDN, Processing and storage)

4. Maintain complete control and access over original images

5. Establish a powerful and convenient omnichannel media experience for all consumers and publishers.

If your company is facing a similar challenge in image processing that is holding you back in optimizing your web performance, reach out to us at 

support@imagekit.io for a quick consultation session. You can also try out the product by creating a free account here