How to Set Up tiny.pictures for Your Website

Updated

tiny.pictures is an image CDN and real-time processing service: you register a subdomain, point it at the folder where your images already live, and then request any size or format of those images through a simple URL or client library. Setup requires no backend development and no infrastructure to maintain — you provide your image folder URL, a username for your subdomain, and an email address, and the service maps the subdomain to that folder. The free Hobby plan is enough to test the API and libraries before deciding whether to scale.

What you need before you start

Three pieces of information are requested during registration:

Field What it means Example / constraint
Your website The web folder where your images live; your tiny.pictures subdomain will be mapped here http://your.domain/images/
Your user name Used to build your subdomain Lower-case letters only, 3–32 characters
Your email Where the confirmation email with an auto-generated password is sent —

You can fill in your billing address later in your personal dashboard, so it isn't a blocker at signup.

Step-by-step setup

  1. Register for the free plan. The site's registration form asks only for the three fields above. Submitting it deploys the service for you — the page describes this as "just these couple of fields."
  2. Check your email. A confirmation message arrives with an auto-generated password for your dashboard.
  3. Confirm the mapping. Your chosen username becomes a subdomain that is mapped to the image folder you supplied. Images stay where they are; nothing is pre-processed or moved.
  4. Request images through the API or a client library. Instead of serving the original file, you request it via tiny.pictures with the transformations you want (resize, crop, size optimization, other effects). The service applies them on the fly and delivers the result.
  5. Verify the result. Compare the delivered file against the original. The site's own example: an original at 980 kB, 1,000 × 667 pixels, 100% quality, scaled by CSS, becomes a 50 kB file at 575 × 384 pixels and 80% quality when scaled by tiny.pictures — a roughly 95% size reduction in that example.

What you get without extra work

  • Automatic format conversion to WebP, plus HTTP/2 and TLS encryption.
  • Edge delivery from nodes around the world, with unlimited horizontal scaling.
  • A second caching layer that keeps your images cached for as long as you want, rather than the couple of hours typical of ordinary CDN services — this relieves pressure on your origin server.
  • Free client libraries alongside the API, so frontend developers can pull any image at any size without backend work.

Plans and when to move up

The Hobby plan is €0/mo (monthly or yearly) and includes 50k requests, 2 GB viewer traffic, and 10k transformations — described as plenty of processing power for a personal project. Paid tiers scale from there: Startup at €49/mo monthly or €44/mo yearly, Business at €129/mo or €114/mo yearly, and Enterprise at €279/mo or €249/mo yearly. The site lists a "Compare plans" section for the full breakdown of what each tier includes.

A practical rule: start on Hobby to test the API and libraries against your real images, then move to a paid tier when your request, traffic, or transformation counts approach the Hobby limits.

Common snags

  • Username rejected: it must be lower-case letters only and between 3 and 32 characters — no digits, capitals, or symbols.
  • Wrong folder mapped: the "Your website" field must point at the directory that actually holds your images, since that is what the subdomain is mapped to.
  • Expecting pre-processing: transformations happen dynamically at request time, so there is no separate build or upload step to wait for.