Image pipelines for tiny teams

An honest image pipeline doesn\'t need a CDN, a transform service, or a build step. Most of our clients ship a few hundred images, total, and re-encoding them on commit is fine.

We use a small CLI script that takes any image dropped into /assets/source and emits AVIF, WebP and JPEG variants at four widths. The whole thing is 80 lines of bash and ImageMagick.

What we get: <picture> elements with three formats, served from the same origin, cached aggressively, and never re-encoded again unless the source changes. No service to fail at 2am.

What we give up: real-time transforms. We don\'t need them. The site\'s art direction is decided once, at launch.