Storing five versions of every product photo is how thumbnails go stale
It is also how storage bills grow. Keep one master and generate whatever dimensions are asked for at request time, and a redesign that changes every image size costs a URL change rather than a re-upload.
· 2 min read
The usual arrangement: on upload, generate a thumbnail, a listing image, a product-page image, a zoom image and an Open Graph image. Store all five. It works, and it produces two problems that show up months apart.
- Storage is five times what it needs to be, forever, for every asset.
- A redesign changes the sizes, and now every asset ever uploaded needs regenerating — a batch job somebody writes, runs, and half-finishes.
The second one is the expensive one, because the half-finished state is invisible. Some products show the new size; some show the old one, slightly wrong, for years.
Masters only
Rutba Media keeps one master per asset and generates whatever dimensions you request at request time, cached at the edge. A redesign that changes every image size is a change to the URLs your templates emit. There is no re-upload and no batch job.
- Masters-only storage — one upload per asset.
- Resize, crop and format conversion on request.
- Edge caching, a direct upload API, and custom domain support.
- Per-organisation quotas and usage reporting.
The drop-in upload provider
The second application is the one nobody asks for and everybody eventually needs: an upload provider, so a CMS stores its assets here rather than on its own disk.
A CMS with images on local disk is a CMS you cannot run two copies of, cannot move without a file sync, and cannot back up separately from its database. Moving the assets out is usually the first thing anybody does when that site grows — and doing it later means rewriting URLs in content somebody wrote three years ago.
Every asset on an application server is a migration somebody will do eventually, at a worse time.
It is also the layer under the rest of the family
Product photos in Rutba Commerce, logos, and attachments across the family are delivered through this. That is the pattern for every platform service: each is sold on its own, and each underpins a product above it. The service is not a side project spun out for extra revenue — it is load-bearing, which is the reason to trust that it will keep being maintained.
| Plan | Price | Storage |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 25 GB — for a small site getting started. |
| Standard | $15 / month | 250 GB — a working store or content site. |
| Scale | $59 / month | 2 TB — heavy catalogues and high traffic. |
| Enterprise | Custom, annual | Large media estates. |
And note what those numbers mean under a masters-only model: 25 GB of masters is a great deal more catalogue than 25 GB of masters-plus-five-renditions.