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Fomin Vasyl
Fomin Vasyl

Posted on • Originally published at Medium

Stop Pre-Generating Image Thumbnails in Laravel — Do It On-The-Fly Instead

#laravel #php #backend #performance

Every Laravel project eventually hits the same wall: a designer asks for a new image size, and suddenly you're writing a migration, a queue job, and a Media Library conversion — just to serve a 400px thumbnail.

There's a simpler way. Generate image variants on demand, cache the result permanently, and move on.

That's exactly what laravel-imagepresets does.

The Problem With Pre-Generated Thumbnails

When you pre-generate image variants (the approach Spatie Media Library encourages by default), you pay upfront:

  • Storage costs for every variant of every image, even ones never viewed
  • Queue processing time on upload
  • Pain when design requirements change and you need to regenerate thousands of files
  • Complex seeding/migration logic for existing images

On-the-fly processing flips this: you process an image the first time it's requested, cache the result, and never touch it again. The tradeoff is a slightly slower first request — which is usually invisible to users.

What Is laravel-imagepresets?

It's a Laravel package built on League/Glide that gives you:

  • A single /imagepreset route that handles all image transformations
  • Automatic caching to any Laravel filesystem disk (local, S3, GCS, FTP)
  • A clean API — helper function, Facade, and Blade directive
  • Named presets so you define sizes once and reuse them everywhere
  • Production-ready security: SSRF protection, allowlists, signed URLs, SVG sanitization

Installation 

composer require fomvasss/laravel-imagepresets
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=imagepresets-config
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The service provider is auto-discovered. No manual registration needed.

Your First Image URL 

// Resize to 800px wide, convert to WebP
$url = imagepreset_url('storage/images/photo.jpg', ['w' => 800, 'fm' => 'webp']);
// → https://example.com/imagepreset?fm=webp&src=storage%2Fimages%2Fphoto.jpg&w=800
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On the first hit, Glide resizes and converts the image, stores it on your configured disk, and returns it with a one-year Cache-Control header. The next request? Pure cache — Laravel never runs.

Named Presets: Define Once, Use Everywhere

Hardcoding ['w' => 300, 'h' => 200, 'fm' => 'webp', 'fit' => 'crop'] everywhere is a maintenance headache. Named presets solve this.

In config/imagepresets.php:

'presets' => [
    'thumb'     => ['w' => 300, 'h' => 200, 'fm' => 'webp', 'fit' => 'crop'],
    'hero'      => ['w' => 1200, 'fm' => 'webp', 'q' => 85],
    'avatar'    => ['w' => 96,  'h' => 96,  'fm' => 'webp', 'fit' => 'crop'],
    'og_banner' => ['w' => 1300, 'h' => 650, 'fit' => 'fill-max', 'fm' => 'jpg', 'bg' => 'ffffff'],
],
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Then in your code:

// String shorthand
$url = imagepreset_url('photo.jpg', 'thumb');

// Facade
Imagepreset::url('photo.jpg', 'hero');
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{{-- Blade directive --}}
<img src="@imagepreset('photo.jpg', 'thumb')" alt="Thumbnail">
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Need to override one param? Pass it alongside the preset name:

// Use thumb preset but output JPG instead of WebP
$url = imagepreset_url('photo.jpg', ['preset' => 'thumb', 'fm' => 'jpg']);
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Fit Methods Explained

The fit parameter controls how the image fills the target dimensions. Choosing the wrong one is a common source of stretched or oddly-cropped images.

Fit Use when...
crop You need exact pixel dimensions (cards, avatars). Edges may be trimmed.
contain The full image must be visible. No fill — transparent space is left.
fill Full image visible, remaining canvas filled with bg color. May upscale.
fill-max Like fill but never upscales. Great for OG images and social banners.
max Like contain but never upscales beyond original size.
stretch Forces exact dimensions ignoring aspect ratio. Rarely a good idea.

For OG images, fill-max is your friend:

$url = imagepreset_url('post-image.jpg', [
    'w' => 1300, 'h' => 650,
    'fit' => 'fill-max',
    'fm' => 'jpg',
    'bg' => 'ffffff',
]);
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S3 / Remote Disk Support

Just set the disk in your .env:

IMAGEPRESET_DISK=s3
IMAGEPRESET_PATH=imagepresets
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The package detects remote disks automatically. Glide processes the image locally, uploads the result to S3 via Flysystem, deletes the local temp file, and streams the response directly from S3. No extra code needed.

Security Out of the Box

Open image-resizing endpoints are a common attack surface. The package handles the main threats:

Allowlists prevent arbitrary dimensions from being requested:

'allowed_widths'  => [100, 200, 400, 800, 1200],
'allowed_heights' => [100, 200, 400, 600],
'allowed_formats' => ['webp', 'jpg', 'png'],
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SSRF protection blocks remote image sources that point to private IPs or localhost.

Image bomb protection rejects files that exceed max_image_pixels (default: 150 Mpx).

Signed URLs (optional) make it impossible to tamper with parameters:

IMAGEPRESET_SIGNED_URL=true
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Once enabled, imagepreset_url() automatically generates HMAC-signed URLs. Changing any parameter returns 403.

Race Condition Protection

What happens when 50 users simultaneously request the same uncached image? Without protection, you'd process the same image 50 times.

The package uses Cache::lock() to ensure only one process generates each variant. Set CACHE_DRIVER=redis for this to work correctly across multiple servers.

Audit Log: Discover What Your Frontend Actually Needs

Before locking down allowlists in production, you can enable audit logging in development to see exactly which params your frontend requests:

IMAGEPRESET_AUDIT_LOG=true
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Then extract unique values from your logs:

grep -oh '"w":[0-9]*' storage/logs/*.log | sort -u
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Use the findings to populate your allowlists before deploying.

CDN and Nginx Caching

Every response ships with:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, s-maxage=31536000, immutable
ETag: "<hash>"
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This makes it trivial to cache at the edge. The README includes ready-to-use configs for Nginx proxy cache and Cloudflare Cache Rules.

To verify your cache is working:

# Run twice — first should be MISS, second HIT
curl -s -o /dev/null -D - "https://example.com/imagepreset?src=photo.jpg&w=800&fm=webp"
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Clearing the Cache 

# Clear all cached presets
php artisan imagepresets:clear

# Clear a specific remote disk
php artisan imagepresets:clear --disk=s3 --path=imagepresets
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Requirements

Dependency Version
PHP ^8.1
Laravel 10 / 11 / 12 / 13
league/glide ^2.0 | ^3.0

Optional: imagick extension for AVIF output and SVG rasterization.

Wrapping Up

If your project doesn't need the full power of Spatie Media Library — associations, conversions, responsive images — and you just want to serve the right image size without pre-generating everything, laravel-imagepresets is worth a look.

Install it, define a few presets, drop @imagepreset() into your Blade templates, and you're done.

composer require fomvasss/laravel-imagepresets
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→ GitHub · Packagist

Have questions or found a bug? Open an issue on GitHub.

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