Jetpack Photon – The TimThumb substitute?

I recently wrote a post about the demise and discontinued image script TimThumb. After years of relying on it for a quick fix way to resize and crop images easily in my website development. I found too often I was running into problems that weren’t worth the benefits. For all of you hardcore dependant TimThumb fans that are still out there AND use it in your WordPress themes, fret not! I’d like to introduce you to:
Jetpack Photon the TimThumb substitute.

What is Jetpack Photon?

First off, Jetpack is a VERY popular collection of plugins/modules that are widely supported and brings all the power of a hosted wordpress.com account to your self-hostedWordPress installation. With over 12 MILLION downloads, it’s hard to ignore it’s appeal.

One of the modules that comes with the Jetpack collection is Photon!

According to their description:

Photon is an image acceleration and editing service for sites hosted on WordPress.com or on Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. That means less load on your host and faster images for your readers.

How is the like TimThumb?

That initial description actually doesn’t sound anything like TimThumb BUT if you dig deeper in their docs, you’ll see in their API documentation all the glory of resizing, cropping, image filters you’ve come to love by using a script like TimThumb:

View the API docs and examples here

I still have trouble justifying going to these lengths on a regular basis for images on my projects BUT that doesn’t mean there still isn’t a demand for this level of control with image manipulation out there for others 🙂 If that is you? You’re welcome 🙂 Cheers!