Why Use Blitline?

Industrial Strength

If you are a website that needs to manipulate large numbers of photos, Blitline is your economical solution.

Convenient

If you are importing photos from an external service and need to crop, thumbnail, or process them, we are your answer.

Versatile

Screenshots, PDFs, animated GIFs, obscure image formats, we are your one stop shop for all of these.

Cheap

No lock-in with us. We push your photos to your storage. We don't want to host your photos and charge you a monthly fee.

Cross Platform

We use a JSON only API that lets you build complex image processing actions accessible from any language or platform

Safe

Worried about making a dependency on a company that might "go away". We have been cash positive for quite some time.

Smart

We have been building large scale, enterprise apps for decades. We are your smart choice.

Low Risk

Pay ONLY for what you use. Even when your service explodes and you are processing huge amounts of images, you get deep discounts for using Blitline.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Do you store my photos?

No.

You need to supply a location for us to put your photos. Usually this is Amazon S3, but we also support Azure.

How do I use Blitline

Our workflow is simple. Submit some JSON to the Blitline server. You can read more about this JSON on our API page.

How do I retrieve my images?

Blitline saves all images to Amazon S3. If you are using S3 as well, you can simply give Blitline permission to a bucket, and we can post the images directly to your account (this is the ideal scenario). Otherwise, you will need to go get the images from the url that Blitline returns to you. Blitline will store the images for a limited amount of time (currently ~1 day), after which they will be removed and inaccessible.

Does the image source always have to be a URL? Can I upload images to Blitline?

Blitline only supports urls for sources. We suggest you use S3 which allows direct browser uploads. You might also be interested in reading our blog post about this very subject.

Why does that save value need an "image_identifier"?

Since Blitline can perform many operations on a single image, it is important that when we return data to you, you know which image we are processing. When you give us an "image_identifier", we return this "image_identifier" back to you with results for that save operation.

Why are some of my photos coming back as png when I asked for jpg?

On certain types of functions (such as rotate, photograph, and composite) there is a transparent layer that is generated. Jpgs do not support that kind of transparency and so we have to change them to png. You can override this behavior by adding "extension" : ".jpg" to the "save" hash if you want the image to be jpg even thought the transparent layer will be forced to white.

Can I really submit 1000s photos at once?

Absolutely. Thousands is not a problem.

Are there rate limits?

We ask that you for each account you keep api job posts below 300,000/hr and 5,000,000/day. If you need more than that please contact us at support@blitline.com.

Can I perform multiple operations on an image? Is there an image "Pipeline"

Absolutely. You can perform multiple functions and multiple subfunctions on an image. You might have an image that you wanted to rotate, and then crop/thumbnail to 2 different smaller sizes. This can all be accomplished through a single json call. You can check our our examples or the more in depth