10 Startup companies that manage their images in the cloud - Part 3

We live in a world where we spend increasingly more time online. As our routines change and adapt to new trends and technologies, we perform more and more of our daily activities in virtual environments. A key example of this is shopping. There are many reasons why online shopping has become so attractive for many buyers. A near endless variety of products is accessible from the palm of your hand. Customer reviews give buyers more confidence in their decisions. It's increasingly easy to search for attractive prices. And the list goes on. But a customer's desire to "touch" or "feel" the product is an interactive experience that can be hard to overcome when shopping online.

We at Cloudinary are excited to host the third annual ImageCon conference on May 1-2 in San Francisco. This year’s event will feature practical hands-on workshops and enlightening talks by thought leaders along with plenty of networking opportunities.

Part 1 of this series delves into the background for this guide. Here in part 2 are the ins and outs.

Wait, hear me out. I know, we just talked about this: Nobody is sheepishly pleading you, “Please, might we have just one more image on the page?” No, I’m not telling you to pick that particular fight. Instead, use a little smoke and mirrors to avoid requests for images that your audience needn’t render right away and might never need at all while loading them asynchronously—only as needed.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the rules of putting images on the web.

For such a flexible medium as the web, software development can feel like a painstaking, rules-oriented game—an errant comma might break a build, a missing semicolon might wipe out an entire page. For a long time, the laws of image rendering seemed similarly cut-and-dry: For example, if your markups contained an img element , the singular content of its src attribute would be foisted on the audience regardless of their browsing context, period.

Consumers today expect media-rich experiences. No longer a novelty, it’s second nature to swipe through multiple photos on mobile apps, zoom in on product images for a closer look, visualize online travel reviews, socialize cool video clips while browsing, and encounter brand messages when walking into brick-and-mortar stores. These experiences weave together visual cues and clues with relevant content to create meaning and more authentic connections for customers.

Recently we added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. This app demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart. At the time, we published Introducing the Cloudinary Demo Android App, Part 1, which provided an under-the-hood tour of how the eCommerce Android App was designed and how Cloudinary was integrated throughout.