Getting started with tiny.pictures

Setting up your account and deploying real-time image optimization to your website in an instant

Get an account

Please sign up on our registration page. There's also a free account for you to choose. You'll need an account to be able to use your own image server as an image source for our service.

If you'd like to have this guide customized to your personal settings, please log into your dashboard and come back here. Until then, we assume you signed up as user demo with an image source called main that is a shortcut to your image server at https://your.website/.

Simple HTML integration

We provide your new image optimization infrastructure under your personal sub domain at https://demo.tiny.pictures/main. The main directory works as a shortcut to your image source servers at https://your.website/.

Additionally, it adds all the image optimization functionality you need and delivers your images through a Content Delivery Network.

You are now able to apply image operations by simply swapping the host name of your image URLs and adding some query parameters:

<img
	alt="Your original image"
	src="https://your.website/example1.jpg">
<img
	alt="The same image in grayscale (delivered by tiny.pictures)"
	src="https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?grayscale=true">

Responsive images

Thanks to HTML5's srcset and sizes attributes you can now speed up your website by delivering perfectly-sized images to your users – no matter what type or size of device they use. These attributes tell the browser that there are a couple of differently sized image candidates to choose from and how large the image will be displayed on the web page. Together with other information already known to the browser – e. g. viewport size, device pixel ratio, network bandwidth, and supported file formats – the browser automatically chooses the best image candidate.

<img
	alt="Image candidates width widths of 200, 500, and 800 pixels,
		displayed at 50% of the viewport width"
	srcset="https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=200 200w, 
		https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=500 500w, 
		https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=800 800w"
	sizes="50vw">

That's quite a lot of code, right? That's why we offer both client and server libraries to make implementing such advanced HTML a whole lot easier.

Lazyloading and automatic srcset and sizes calculation with our JavaScript client library

Coding srcset and sizes attributes over and over again can be a tedious and error prone task. That's why you as a good developer are probably also a lazy developer… Take a look at how our JavaScript client library may help you:

<img
	alt="This image will be lazyloaded and automatically wrapped by an HTML5 picture element"
	class="tp-lazyload"
	data-tp-src="https://your.website/example1.jpg"
	data-tp-sizes="auto">

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/tiny.pictures-js@4.2.5/dist/browser.js"></script>
<script>
	var tinyPictures = new TinyPictures({
		window: window,
		user: "demo",
		namedSources: [{"name":"main","url":"https://your.website/"}],
		srcsetWidths: [200,500,800]
	})
	tinyPictures.lazyload()
</script>

Our library automatically converts your img element to a comprehensive picture element with lazyloading, automatic image candidate selection and support for the WebP image format.

<picture>
	<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none"><![endif]-->
	<source type="image/webp" srcset="https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?format=webp&width=200 200w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?format=webp&width=500 500w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?format=webp&width=800 800w" sizes="<actualWidth>px">
	<source srcset="https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=200 200w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=500 500w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=800 800w" sizes="<actualWidth>px">
	<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
	<img class="tp-lazyloaded" src="https://your.website/example1.jpg" srcset="https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=200 200w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=500 500w,https://demo.tiny.pictures/main/example1.jpg?width=800 800w" sizes="<actualWidth>px">
</picture>

Server-side libraries

One drawback of the client-side JavaScript technique is that the browser starts loading images only after the JavaScript is loaded and executed. For "above the fold" images you might want to use a server-side solution. That's why we also offer several server-side libraries, e. g. for Node.js.

const TinyPictures = require('tiny.pictures-js')
const tinyPictures = new TinyPictures({
    user: 'demo',
    namedSources: [{"name":"main","url":"https://your.website/"}],
    srcsetWidths: [200,500,800]
})
const imageUrl = "https://your.website/example1.jpg"

const middleware = (req, res) => {
    return res.send(`
        <img
            alt="The image in grayscale (delivered by tiny.pictures)"
            src="${tinyPictures.url(imageUrl, {grayscale: true})}">
        <img
            alt="Image candidates width widths of 200, 500, and 800 pixels,
                displayed at 50% of the viewport width"
            srcset="${tinyPictures.srcsetArray(imageUrl, {grayscale: true}).join(', ')}"
            sizes="50vw">
    `)
}

For more information, please take a look at our documentation for the Node.js and PHP library.