Google’s authentication-less on-the-fly image resizing service

google-img-resize.mdown

Google's authentication-less on-the-fly image resizing service

I found it while poking around the Google+ HTML. Jotting down some notes felt like a good idea, so here goes. If you know more about this API, let me know, please!

(Word of warning: I spent ~30 minutes on both my experimentation and this here write-up, so it might not be the most thought-provoking, brilliant thing you read today.)

Base URL

https://images1-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy

Parameters:

• url: original image URL
• container: must be "focus" (i dunno lol)
• refresh: time (in seconds) to cache it on G's servers
• resize_w: width in pixels
• resize_h: height in pixels

You can either specify both resize_* parameters or just one.

Examples

Let's resize that big panorama picture I took in Istanbul last year.

Make it square, 300x300px:

https://images1-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropboxusercontent.com%2Fu%2F7298%2Fblog%2FBlick_von_der_S%25C3%25BCleymaniye-Moschee.jpg&container=focus&resize_w=300&resize_h=300

Make it 750px wide and keep the aspect ration:

https://images1-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropboxusercontent.com%2Fu%2F7298%2Fblog%2FBlick_von_der_S%25C3%25BCleymaniye-Moschee.jpg&container=focus&resize_w=750

Quirks

At least in Chrome, opening the URL in the browser will force a download of a text file (which is actually a JPG). Putting the URL in an <img> tag is fine. Or just use curl.

Hi! Do you know if this service is actually working? Where is the official site for the API? Thanks!

There is no official documentation for this API, maybe its build by some google enginer or google community.

Ok! Because today it stopped working for some of our websites (status code 502) and I was wondering if Google shut it down.

Yep, me too. Hopefully this service not going shutdown.