Managing images and files in the backend

Files, especially images, are essential to modern web applications. Apart from the usual story of an image being worth a thousand words, images have multiple functions – aesthetic (incorporated in your site branding and color schemes and conveying certain emotions), informative (in our case, the user wants to see whether the car they are considering is worth buying!), and so on. The evolution of the process of serving images has evolved with the web itself; serving optimized and fast-loading images of the right dimensions and resolution has become an essential task in web development and there are many solutions, at various levels, that help us achieve good results.

First, the images have to be stored somewhere and have to be accessible by the app. While you could be storing images on your web server and serving them pretty quickly (they are, after all, static assets), the tendency is to host them on a third-party provider and make...