"Every image is unique in its content, and every visitor to your website has a different device, resolution, browser and network speed. It is challenging to deliver an optimal image to every user, especially when you need to scale that up to hundreds, thousands or millions of images."

This article discusses the challenges that web and mobile developers face and introduces a cloud based solution for automatic content-aware and context-aware image adaptation: automatic cropping, intelligent content-aware encoding, dynamic format selection and automatic responsive images using Client Hints.

Is there a library that has similar functionality? I rather take care of image manipulation locally, it seems such a waste of bandwidth and resources to send large images just to have them cropped.

Edited to say the service itself looks awesome, I just wished it was local.

If you want to do smart cropping locally, you might want to take a look at this: https://github.com/jwagner/smartcrop.js/

It's not as sophisticated as what we implemented for Cloudinary, but it's a good start.

Here's an interactive demo of the auto crop feature: https://demo.cloudinary.com/?mode=ga

And here's an interactive demo of the auto quality feature: https://demo.cloudinary.com/?mode=qa

Looks like https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/njones/imageflow-respec... spurred them into action by offering the same thing, but without the proprietary, permanent lock-in factor.