Picsha AI API - Serverless Media Backend and Vector Search

## The Problem

Managing digital asset pipelines at scale traditionally requires stitching together disparate storage, compute, database, and CDN services. Teams spend months integrating object storage, image processing libraries, vector databases, and delivery networks before writing a single line of application logic. Picsha abstracts this complexity behind a single, elegant API that auto-scales from zero to thousands of concurrent ingestion requests seamlessly.

## How It Works

Picsha AI API provides a unified endpoint for the entire media lifecycle:

• **Subscribe** via AWS Marketplace and receive your API credentials
• **Ingest** media assets through a single REST endpoint or the official Node.js and Python SDKs - RAW, PSD, HEIC, multi-page PDFs, PowerPoint, standard images, and video are all supported natively
• **Search** your media library using natural language queries, facial recognition, or spatial filtering - powered by built-in k-NN vector search on AWS OpenSearch
• **Deliver** optimized, edge-cached assets globally through a unified delivery pipeline with dynamic transformations

## Key Capabilities

• **Universal Format Support:** Process complex formats (RAW, PSD, HEIC, multi-page PDF, PPTX) that typically require custom processing pipelines, handled automatically at ingestion
• **AI-Powered Semantic Search:** Query media using natural language descriptions or facial recognition without provisioning a separate vector database or training custom models
• **Automatic Scaling:** Infrastructure scales from zero to peak demand with no capacity planning, server management, or cold-start configuration
• **Global Edge Delivery:** Retrieve dynamically optimized media through a high-availability CDN pipeline with zero infrastructure management
• **Built on AWS:** Leverages AWS OpenSearch for vector retrieval and integrates - natively with AWS infrastructure for low-latency performance
• **Official SDKs:** Typed Node.js and Python clients (npm install picsha, pip install picsha) cover search, upload, and delivery URLs in a few lines of code, with zero added dependencies and full TypeScript definitions

## Use Cases

• **Consumer Photo Applications:** Power gallery apps with intelligent search, automatic organization, and fast global delivery
• **Enterprise Asset Management:** Give marketing teams natural language search across thousands of brand assets in any format
• **AI Agent Backends:** Provide autonomous agents with secure, scalable media ingestion and retrieval capabilities
• **Content Platforms:** Enable creators to upload any format and deliver optimized media to end users worldwide

## What You Pay For

Metered pay-as-you-go through AWS Marketplace. No seats, no minimums, no upfront commitment.

• **Ingestion and storage:** $0.0005 per asset ingested, $0.05 per GB per month of active storage, $0.001 per file scanned for viruses and malware
• **Search and understanding:** $0.0005 per vector embedding for both indexing and queries, $0.0015 per image for label and scene detection, $0.001 per image for safety moderation, $0.005 per multimodal summary
• **Generative image editing:** $0.06 per 1K lite edit, $0.16 per 2K standard edit including free 4K export upscale, $0.32 per native 4K edit, $0.16 per AI background swap, $0.0015 per background removal
• **Delivery and access:** $0.00005 per authenticated API request, $0.15 per GB of edge delivery bandwidth

## Sizing Example

A photo application ingesting 1,000 new photos in a month, indexing them, running 5,000 searches, and serving 20,000 image views meters at about **$9.35 per month**. That covers ingestion, virus scanning, label detection, safety moderation, embeddings, 5 GB of stored media, 4 GB of edge delivery, and 30,000 API requests. Generative editing is billed only when you use it: adding 200 standard 2K edits would bring the month to $41.35. Costs scale linearly with volume, with no tier cliffs or step changes.

## Getting Started

After subscribing through AWS Marketplace, visit https://picsha.ai/docs for complete API references, SDK guides, and integration tutorials covering authentication, your first API call, and production best practices. Official SDKs are available on npm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/picsha) and PyPI, with quickstarts at https://picsha.ai/docs/node and https://picsha.ai/docs/python.

Whether you are building a consumer photo gallery, an enterprise marketing asset manager, or an autonomous AI agent that needs to process and retrieve visual data, Picsha AI API provides the speed, scalability, and intelligence required to go to market faster.