Top-rated Image Editing API: What You Need To Know

In today’s digital era, thousands of images are uploaded on the web every day. For example, businesses use images on their web apps and websites to communicate effectively with customers and improve user experience. Similarly, people worldwide upload photos daily on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Naturally, everyone wants to upload great photos. For instance, people wish to add filters to their photos, crop and resize pictures, reduce noise in images, enhance underexposed photos, etc.

Additionally, businesses must optimize web images to improve loading times. As a result, developers are constantly looking for ways to provide photo editing experience in their apps and websites. This is where an image editing API is helpful.

In this article, we’ll discuss the features to look for in a top-rated image editing API and show you some of the best image editing APIs.

What is an Image Editing API?

Let’s first discuss what an API is.

An API is an application programming interface that enables two software or apps to communicate and exchange data. Today, APIs are everywhere. For example, whenever you open Facebook or check the weather on your smartphone, you use an API. APIs ease the application development process, allowing developers to integrate existing data and functionality into their apps quickly.

Hence, an image editing API enables developers to integrate image editing functionality into their apps without increasing your bundle size. This way, developers don’t have to write code for different image editing features from scratch.

Why Do You Need to Use an Image Editing API?

An image editing API provides a quick and efficient way to add image editing features to your app. It provides a structured way to manipulate, transform and enhance images quickly. For example, users can add special effects to their photos, pixelate images, restore blurry images, remove watermarks from pictures, etc.

What are the Benefits of Using a Top-Rated Image Editing API?

Here are the key benefits of using a top-rated image editing API:

Time-Saving Benefits

Using an image editing API allows developers to save time. This is because developers don’t have to write code for different image editing features, such as cropping, resizing, filters, etc., from scratch.

Cost-Effective 

An image editing API also helps reduce costs. For example, you don’t have to spend time and resources coding the functionality from scratch.

Additionally, many image editing APIs offer flexible and budget-friendly pricing plans.

Advanced Features and Tools

Top-rated image editing API offers advanced features and tools, such as improving the resolution and quality of pictures, upscaling photos, automatic image optimization, image file type conversion, removing noise from photos, red eye removal, and many more.

What Factors Do You Need to Consider When Choosing an Image Editing API?

Here are the key factors to remember while choosing an image editing API for your app:

Ease of Integration

An image editing API should be easy to integrate into your apps and work flawlessly.

Additionally, it should support multiple frameworks and programming languages. To ease the integration process, this API should also have extensive documentation explaining all the API events, methods, and endpoints.

Customization options

A good image-editing API offers customization options, such as UI customization to match the look and feel of your app, filter customization, etc.

Customer Support and Maintenance Services

When choosing an image-enhancing and editing API, evaluating custom support and maintenance services is essential. This way, you can quickly resolve any issues or problems caused by the API in your app and enhance user experience.

Security Features

Users are always concerned about the security and privacy of their photos while using an image editing tool. Hence, it’s crucial to choose a photo editing API for your app that is highly secure. For instance, the API should authenticate requests, offer encryption (HTTPS) and controlled access, etc., to process and deliver files securely.

Scalability

It’s best to choose a scalable API, so you can add more API requests and features as your customer base grows.

What Features Should You Look for in a Top-Rated Image Editing API?

While several image editing APIs are available in the market, not all APIs offer the features you need.

Here are the key features to look for in a photo editing API:

Automated Transformations

A good image transformation and editing API should enable you to automate processes, such as image enhancement, file conversion, etc. This way, you can quickly build your desired workflows.

Advanced Filters

People today want a wide range of filters in an image editing tool. Hence, you should choose a photo editing API that offers several filters, including basic and advanced filters, such as sharpen, blur, pixelate, monochrome, sepia, oil paint, modulate, etc.

Cropping and Resizing Tools

Cropping and resizing are the basic features of an image editing and enhancement tool. Hence, an image editing API should allow you to manipulate the width and height of an image, change the image’s alignment, and crop images while preserving the aspect ratio.

Image Optimization

Image optimization helps improve the site’s speed and is crucial for providing excellent user experience and improving SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) When people use an image editing tool, they want image optimization features.

A top-rated image editing API should offer features like image conversion and compression for optimizing images. This way, users can make their pictures responsive while maintaining image quality. A good photo editing API also offers features like removing embedded metadata from an image file.

Wide Range of Editing Tools

In addition to basic editing features like cropping, resizing, and filters, a photo editing API should include editing tools and features, such as image upscaling, red eye removal, image borders and effects, image rotation and flip, adding watermarks to images, and more.

Top-Rated Image Editing APIs

Here, we’ve listed the top three image editing APIs available in the market:

Filestack Image Editing API

Filestack offers a Processing API, one of the best APIs for editing, enhancing, and transforming images.

Features

• With Filestack processing API, users can easily upscale photos and improve resolution. This way, you can enlarge your photos without losing quality.
• Users can enhance the overall image quality using the ‘enhance’ feature. This feature smartly analyzes a photo and applies different enhancements, such as color correction.
• You can use the ‘Vivid’ preset to add depth and brightness to your photos.
• With the ‘fix_dark’ preset, you can enhance underexposed photos. This feature turns off the contrast and efficiently restores details from the shadow areas.
• The API can automatically scan each face in a photo and applies enhancements.
• The powerful API can detect noise in a picture and remove any grains by using powerful noise-removal techniques.
• Users can remove abnormal tints, such as green, yellow, or blue, from their pictures using the ‘fix_tint’ feature.
• The Filestack processing API also offers a red-eye removal feature for enhancing photos.
• You can choose from several image borders and effects, such as ’rounded corners,’ ‘polaroid,’ ‘shadow,’ ‘circle,’ ‘border,’ torn edges, etc.
• With Filestack image editing API, users can apply different filters to their pictures, such as sharpen, pixelate, blur, sepia, monochrome, and many more.
• The API also enables users to crop and resize photos. It also offers a smart crop feature that preserves the photo’s aspect ratio but removes unwanted fragments.
• Filestack processing API has detailed documentation consisting of several examples and all the details about API events and methods.

Abstract Image Processing and Optimization API

Abstract Image Processing and Optimization API allows you to edit and manage images programmatically.

Features

• With the Abstract API, you can reduce the size of your images without losing quality. The API uses lossy compression to reduce image size with only a small drop in image quality.
• Users can easily resize and crop images. The API offers several options for resizing and cropping an image, such as exact, portrait, fit, landscape, auto, square, and fill.
• The API uses 256-bit SSL encryption (HTTPS) to secure all data sent and processed.
• The Abstract Image Processing and Optimization API is easy to integrate and maintain and has a reliable uptime. Additionally, the API is super fast and can process images quickly.
• The API has detailed documentation and an excellent technical support team that quickly resolves issues and problems. 

Designify API

The Designify API enables you to automate the image editing process and accelerate your workflow.

Features

• The Designify API offers an automatic image enhancement feature, which uses AI to automatically enhance an image, fix its colors, adjust the contrast, and correct underexposure within a few seconds.
• With Designify, you can automatically remove the background from your images.
• Designify enables users to increase photo resolution automatically.
• Users can also choose to edit photos the way they want. For example, when you upload a photo, you can choose from several AI-suggested designs for your photo. You can then edit the design or even create one from scratch.
• With Designify, users can add 3D shadows to their images for a more professional touch. Users can also pixelate or sharpen images, choose from different styles, adjust aspect ratio, etc.
• Designify also supports bulk editing, a great time-saving feature.

Comparison Table