Quick Facts

Imagen is an open source server-based solution for automatic generation of personalized images.

With Imagen your web site can create images on-the-fly by applying different transformations (crop/rotate/resize) over existing images and adding text and graphics. The result can be delivered to the browser in any image format (GIF/JPG/PNG).

All this is performed on the server, using a custom scripting language. You can pass parameters to the scripts from HTML , thus controlling the scripts' behavior and reusing one and the same script for different purposes.

Imagen can be used for dynamic generation of navigation menus and page titles, customizable product catalogs, zoom in high resolution images, graphics charts, image galleries with automatic thumbnails, image passwords generation, dynamic banners and many more.

Imagen is equipped with a smart high performance cache, which avoids multiple generation of one and the same image. The scalable architecture allows heavy loaded sites to benefit from deploying Imagen on several servers in a cluster - thus performance is increased and the possibility of a single point of failure is eliminated.

Imagen works under Linux and can be installed as a plug-in to Apache or can be used as a stand-alone cgi-bin application. Imagen uses ImageMagick for image manipulations and FreeType for text rendering.

Features

• Operates with over 60 image formats, incl. TIFF, GIF, JPG, PNG.
• Creates a composite image by combining several separate images
• Transforms images (crop, resize, rotate, etc)
• Applies effects (sharp, blur, color-reduce, etc)
• Draws shapes and text in any font, size, color
• Zoom and Pan on any part of the image
• Easy-to-learn script language with integrated debugger, profiler, and different log levels
• Automatic email notification on error in scripts
• Advanced Cache which reduces loading time
• High performance and availability provided by clustering architecture
• Apache Plug-in Architecture

Benefits

• Images across the entire web site can be modified at any desired frequency to keep content fresh and up-to-date.

• Imagen separates content from design, thus automating Web graphics production and reducing the time needed to maintain the content.
• Imagen makes changes in the Feel and Look Concept simple (you can change branding elements like Fonts, Color all over the site by updating a single file)
• Easy script parametrization from HTML allows for a great re-usability of imagen scripts.

Applications

• Dynamic content sites

• Automatic thumbnails generation
• Decoration of images with a border or frame
• Fast delivery of very large images, using the zoom features
• Prevent automated registrations by image-based passwords