---
title: 'Why TwicPics?'
category: 'getting-started'
position: 1
features:
  - Automatic layout-driven sizing and cropping
  - Lazy loading out of the box
  - Blazing-fast, URL-based API with transformations chaining
  - AI-powered Background Removal, Smart Crop, and Refit
  - Adaptive compression
  - Automatic Next-Gen formats
  - SEO optimizations
  - Rock-solid architecture
  - Global CDN
---

# Why TwicPics?

## The problem

Websites are heavier than ever and the main culprits are images and videos. They eat up network bandwidth and increase the time visitors spend waiting for pages to load. Every tenth of a second reduces the overall conversion rate and dramatically impacts revenue.

With a wide range of devices, screen sizes, and pixel densities to support, tailoring images and videos is extremely challenging. Depending on the approach, it can complicate server-side architectures by an order of magnitude, make for convoluted deployment strategies, or just kill client-side performance.

This is where TwicPics comes in.

## The solution

TwicPics is a **Responsive Media Service Solution** (SaaS). It offers on-demand responsive image and video generation combined with a smart and unobtrusive drop-in replacement for the native `<img>`, `<picture>`, and `<video>` elements. All powered by a no-nonsense and testable [URL-based API](/docs/reference/transformations).

### Context-aware optimization

TwicPics acts as a media proxy. It requests your _master_ image or video from your web server, cloud storage, or DAM, then generates a **device-adapted version** delivered directly to the end user **from the closest delivery point** available.

<illustration src="docs/how-it-works-timeline.png" width="2154" height="502" alt="How It Works Timeline" placeholder="none"></illustration>

As a developer, this means you only deal with the high-resolution version of your assets, while end users receive **optimized** and **perfectly sized** variants.

<doc-details title="Show me an example">
Let's consider a full-width banner.</br></br>
A Brazilian tourist roaming the streets of Paris with an iPhone will fetch a <span class="font-medium">750px</span> wide, <span class="font-medium">33kB</span>, and <span class="font-medium">JPEG</span> image from one of our two delivery points in the French capital. The same person, now using Chrome on a MacBook back in their home country, will fetch a <span class="font-medium">1440px</span> wide, <span class="font-medium">114kB</span>, <span class="font-medium">WebP</span> image from our delivery point in São Paulo or in Rio de Janeiro, whichever is the closest.</br></br>
Widths, and thus file sizes, would be different if the iPhone was in landscape mode, if Chrome did not cover the whole screen of the MacBook, or if the MacBook had a retina display. TwicPics takes everything into consideration: orientation, dimensions on screen, pixel density, and much more!
</doc-details>

### Designed for Developers

TwicPics services fall into two categories: **client libraries** and a **URL-based API**.

Client libraries include:

- [TwicPics Components](/docs/essentials/components) _(recommended)_ — the TwicPics Components bring image and video best practices out of the box to your favorite front-end JavaScript framework.
- [TwicPics Native](/docs/essentials/native) — for native HTML/JS integration.

After [setting up your account](/docs/getting-started/setup), integrate one of our client libraries to benefit from context-aware optimizations for your media. The libraries understand the end user's device, connection, and CSS. They will **automatically form API requests** so that your assets are **perfectly adapted to the context** of your users.

You will rarely need to write API requests by hand. It will likely only happen when you can't rely on JavaScript context-aware optimization (emails, native apps, etc.)

## Features

<features-list :items="features"></features-list>

In the next section, see how to set up your account before integrating TwicPics into your website.