title: How does IMDb do its on-the-fly image resize and cropping?
body: <p>I've been researching CDNs and image thumbnail generation and I was impressed with how IMDb does its image manipulation. Here's an example of a thumbnail version:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTc0MzU5ODQ5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODIwODk1._V1._SY98_CR1,0,67,98_.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTc0MzU5ODQ5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODIwODk1._V1._SY98_CR1,0,67,98_.jpg</a></p>
  
  <p>And here's a tweaked version that plays with size and cropping:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTc0MzU5ODQ5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODIwODk1._V1._SY400_CR10,40,213,314_.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTc0MzU5ODQ5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODIwODk1._V1._SY400_CR10,40,213,314_.jpg</a></p>
  
  <p>It seems pretty straight forward where everything from '.V1._...' on is used to determine how to manipulate the image. This is all done impressibly fast and I decided to find an existing solution that mimics this functionality.</p>
  
  <p>I was able to find plenty of solutions in image re-sizing and I did find the Google App Engine's page on Transforming Images in Java. However, I don't think Amazon's IMDb is using Google to serve its images and since all my images are on Amazon's S3, I don't think I can use that solution.</p>
  
  <p>After four hours of online searching, I decided to ask the intelligent crowd here.</p>
  
  <p>Further context: I am building a web application on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk and I'm thinking of having a separate server (perhaps another Beanstalk) to handle the images...similar to what IMDb is doing.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for your insight.</p>