On-demand Image Manipulation Services?

[bl0wfish]

Hi there,

What I'm looking for is a service performing programmatic on-demand image manipulation for the web. In case not entirely clear, here is what I mean.

I discovered SteadyOffload (Remote Image Manipulation and Thumbnail Generation - SteadyOffload). It can do basic image processing (resizing, cropping, flipping, rotation) remotely and on-demand. Instead of having CPU-intensive thumbnailing scripts on my web server, I can simply use a couple of custom HTML attributes and the resulting thumbnail is spitted out from the SteadyOffload cache servers:

<img srcx="abc.jpg" xmanip="rescalewidth 150" xjpegquality="75" />

The above HTML code produces a proportionally resized thumbnail with a width of 150 pixels and a JPEG quality factor of 75. This enables me not to worry about the thumbnail file - I just treat it as the original, with the same name (in the above case "abc.jpg" is the name of the large image on my server). The great flexibility with this approach is obvious - you only store one file, thus synchronization between the thumbnail and the original happens to be automatic.

The only drawback for me with SteadyOffload is the lack of a watermarking feature. Apart from that, it fits my requirements perfectly.

Does anyone here know a similar service supporting watermarks too? How do you find the concept? Would you rather use such a service instead of all the hassle with GD, ImageMagick or whatever else?

Thanks in advance,
Mark