[chatmasta]

Here the only binary program you need installed to scale the image is curl. If you want to do it yourself, you need a whole bunch of image processing libraries installed. Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway. Then you're back to where you started, making an http call to an external service. Unless latency is a critical factor, an image scaling API is attractive because you do not need to waste development time setting up (and scaling) your own image processing environment.

[bluedino]

In this case you also don't have to store the images.

[stephenr]

> Because of that, you'll probably end up separating your image processing logic onto its own host on your internal network, anyway

Not everyone is obsessed with microservices.