Cloudinary Blog

When I first learned about Cloudinary back in 2013, it literally seemed like web-development magic. You upload your images and videos to it and, in short order, Cloudinary has served them in the most optimal formats and quality for all browsers and devices. It blew me away. No doubt some of you have felt the same way.

One photo can morph into a thousand photos through a simple application of bits and pieces of transformation effects. A few examples of the common effects are Black and White, Duotone, Blurs and Fades, Cartoonification, and Color Pop.

We are excited to be at Dreamforce 2019 (booth #1912) in San Francisco this week meeting with partners, customers, and industry colleagues on the power of digital experiences and dynamic media management.

With the imminent shutdown of Scene7 after rebranding by Adobe as part of Dynamic Media, dozens of leading eCommerce companies, among them the world’s top three eCommerce brands, have migrated to Cloudinary as a viable alternative to Scene7. And for good reason: time is of the essence and Cloudinary promises not only a smooth migration flow and continuity of their rich-media initiative, but also numerous superb capabilities.

The trendy duotone effect is ubiquitous in today’s websites and illustrations for good reason: it highlights content well, rendering it pleasing to the eye, especially on minimal web platforms. The sky is the limit as to how much you can play with colors while applying a duotone effect. You could keep trying them out until something stands out.

It’s widely known that video is the most effective way of communicating your brand to your audience. It is also an extremely varied medium. Take a look at the existing videos in your media library, you’ll find videos with differing lengths, colors, brightness and density of content. All of these videos need to be optimized in a different way. Cloudinary’s new automatic video quality can intelligently analyze each and every video to encode it using the most optimized settings, ensuring the best trade-off between file size and visual quality, whilst also maintaining a consistent experience throughout. All you need to do is set the quality parameter to auto (q_auto in URLs) and Cloudinary will take care of the rest.

Delivering video files to users can be a much more complex undertaking than many people stop to consider. There are a large variety of video formats and codecs to choose between, and various optimization parameters for encoding the videos. Parameters such as bitrate, key-frame-interval, and frame-rate will have an effect on the visual quality and bandwidth requirements when delivering the video file. To make matters worse, there are so many potential viewing devices out there (desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, etc). Each of these devices have different browsers or apps, and they all support different formats and codecs!

Increasingly, companies large and small, across all industries are enhancing their customer and brand experiences through video. We’ve just launched our dynamic video platform and shared our thoughts on the differences between traditional online video platforms (OVPs) and dynamic ones when it comes to creating, managing, and delivering compelling and engaging videos.

Online video platforms (OVPs) first launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a similar promise to the once-iconic automobile brand: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. However, as OVPs evolved, partly to address our insatiable appetite for video, they became more and more complex. Tools for every step of the video-delivery process—from ingestion to storage to encoding, and so forth—came with their own set of shiny knobs and dials. Configurations and procedures for even trivial tasks required a study of user manuals, causing disenchantment, stress, and aversion all around. Cloudinary is excited to be launching new, game-changing video-management capabilities today to tackle that challenge.

Having an eCommerce platform that both provides a seamless and satisfactory shopping experience, while also serving as a powerful back-office system is crucial to business success today.

As a leading eCommerce platform, Magento offers numerous essential features. Additionally, you can leverage its extensions, such as those for dedicated payments and advanced media management, for other purposes. Cloudinary, long a popular Magento extension, just released a new version with the following powerful features: