Do Locations Matter for Contextual ImageDelivery?

Question

SDL Contextual Image Delivery (CID), in it's first release, gives you the ability to get a transformed version of an original image (in Content Delivery) with the following options:

• Resize with or without cropping
• Trim
• Convert format
• Chain the above

This is done by sending modified image Url paths to the Content Delivery (CD) server which create and cache the the appropriate variations.

I wanted to confirm:

1. Is there a difference to requesting an image on a page or through a browser? To resize an image, do we just "template" out the modified path?
2. Can CID run/be installed for the CD (OData) Web service?
3. Do the images have to reside on the CD server? Can it handle images hosted elsewhere (with image source URLs pointing to other domains)?

Answer 1

1. Yes, you need to map the original image path to have /<path to CID Service>/Path/To/Image.png/transformation/instructions, or something like /cid/mylogo.png/100x100
2. Yes, since you can request a binary image from the OData WebService. Not sure how the URL would look like, but it is indeed possible.
3. The images can be anywhere, there are some rules to configure in the CID configuration about which hosts can request a transformation and from which hosts you're allowed to load an image from. CID image URLs could be in the format of http://cidserver.company.com/cid/http/anotherserver.company.com/images/someimage.jpg/to/png