Not sure how it compares, but thumbor is fully extensible. There are people using it with HBase, others with Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront, others with filesystem based solutions and yet others with redis or mongo backed images.
Other than storage, you can extend loading images from different places, as well as changing the imaging library thumbor uses.
You can also extend the filters or the detection mechanisms.
Anyway, good to know about magickly.
any tips on plugging-in any 3rd party image processing filters? Maybe I looked in the wrong place, but could only see storage plugins on the wiki.
For example, we have a ruby-based library for converting images for different types of colour-blindness[0]. It's available from ruby, or via the command line. How could we use it as a filter in thumbor?
It can be easily implemented as a filter[1][2]. If you need to use it via command-line you can save the current buffer as a tempfile[3], call your CLI with the tempfile path and read the tempfile to use as the new buffer.
It's even simpler if your CLI can take a stdin argument, since you can just pass the buffer as a stdin parameter.
Thumbor's filter infrastructure allows you to change the image incrementally.
