Gcore has announced the debut of Image Stack, its cloud-based image optimisation for CDN.

Developed to optimise images processed on Gcore’s all-in-one edge solution, Image Stack reduces file sizes by an average of 85% without visible quality loss, and delivers compressed images worldwide on a wide range of devices and browsers.

By using Gcore Image Stack, the company says that businesses could make savings of around 30% on their web hosting costs due to needing less bandwidth and storage space. In addition, Image Stack supports advanced compression with the AVIF format, regarded by the industry as a technically superior option.

Commercial and product websites, blogs, and online stores typically contain countless digital images. Those images should display on their end-users’ devices quickly, with size parameters aligned according to viewing device, and in the best possible quality. Image Stack facilitates faster page load times, improves the quality and speed of loading images on customer websites, and simplifies site management procedures.

“Today, when image-rich resources are becoming increasingly popular, it is especially important to offer solutions that allow even heavy websites to load in real time,” explained Dmitriy Akulov, Director of Edge Network Stream at Gcore.

“With Image Stack, a brand-new feature for the Gcore Edge Network, our clients can optimise their web images on the fly. Website pages will load faster, and visitors will have a consistently better user experience. This positively affects search ranking positions, as well as the overall business metrics of your web service.”

Image Stack is a paid option for the Gcore CDN product. Charges are applied once per each image used, irrespective of how many transformations were made (compressing, resizing, cropping, or quality changing). At present, Gcore Image Stack comes with the following functionality:

●          AVIF image compression — Use the most modern and progressive image format designed for the web to improve website performance

●          WebP image compression – Convert PNG and JPG into lightweight and high-fidelity images

●          Image quality settings — Adjust to control webpage load speeds and CDN traffic

●          Image resizing tool — Easily scale to specific end-user device

●          Image cropping tool — Quickly remove any areas outside desired frame.

All image transformations are performed on the edge clusters of Gcore’s network, which means that customers need not worry about using up computational resources at the host server. All bulk operations can be applied to original image copies by simply adding a few query strings with specific parameters, ensuring website visitors receive a properly formatted image no matter what device they’re using.

The global architecture of Gcore CDN, located on six continents, was created on third Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Today, it includes more than 140 PoPs around the world in Tier IV and Tier III data centres, with a total capacity exceeding 110 Tbps.

Find out more about Image Stack here.