As the end of 2015 approaches, we wanted to share a quick summary of Cloudinary’s accomplishment this year and some of our plans for next year. We couldn't possibly do this without including an image manipulation example! That's our hat trick in the title :-)
2015 was a great year for Cloudinary. We more than doubled our numbers, including our team size, offices, customers and revenues. During 2015 we’ve hit another significant milestone, crossing the eight-figures in annual run rate.
This is a guest post by Eric Portis – a proud member of (and newsletter-writer for) the Responsive Issues Community Group. The RICG formulated, championed, and standardized the new HTML features presented in the article.
It can be quite a challenge to graphically design a website or mobile application that displays images in very precise shapes and orientations. This can take the form of warping 2D pictures to have a 3D perspective, placing images in precise shapes or overlaying images in specific locations within another image, for example: overlaying an image over the screen of a smartphone.
Content Optimization and Personalization programs can deliver tremendous ROI to an organization but tend to be very resource intensive, requiring developers to build the code for alternate experiences and creative folks to generate the content. Many of the content optimization/personalization tools out there today (Maxymiser, Optimizely, Adobe Target, Ensighten etc.) have created WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors to help relieve the code/development bottleneck but the creative bottleneck stubbornly remains.
Over the past few months Inviqa have been working to build an official plugin to simplify the process of adding Cloudinary to the 100,000s of Magento sites around the world. Inviqa is one of Magento’s largest partners in Europe and has been working with customers to integrate Cloudinary and ensure that the plugin can cater to a Magento store’s needs.
At Cloudinary, we always seek to seamlessly leverage the best optimized image formats for any of the different use cases for web and mobile applications. Therefore, we quickly added support for FLIF: uploading of FLIF files and dynamic conversion of any image format to FLIF or from FLIF.
If you have an application that allows users to upload their own photos, it can be very useful to be able to organize these photos according to their content. This will allow you to categorize the content for displaying to all your users and make your image library searchable. Furthermore, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload and find different trends of what people care about. Other added benefits can also include the ability to display matching content to your users according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
Last week Cloudinary attended, and exhibited at, its first ever Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent. The event was packed with a multitude of companies, promoting their products and enticing passers by into their booths with cool t-shirts mini robots and even freshly baked cookies. With a full team manning the booth, we perfected our pitch and attracted a steady stream of visitors. Even some of Cloudinary’s favorite customers stopped by to say hello! Redbull, Stylight and Accenture to name a few.
As the number of images and videos on a website continue to grow, slower load times and thus a negative user experience are both growing concerns for any company. An article this summer in The Fiscal Times, citing Internet data measurement company HTTP Archive, noted that the average website is now 2.1 MB in size, compared to 1.5 MB two years ago. And one of the biggest reasons for this growth is the addition of content such as videos and engaging images designed to drive more traffic to the site.
As a website/app developer or owner, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of glitches and mishaps when it comes to users or site visitors sharing your content. Many outlets such as news and media sites, social networks, or e-commerce sites include the option to "like" or "share" content such as blog posts or images. Once shared, the social network site displays a snippet of the shared content alongside a featured image. This way, your site content gets maximum exposure in social networks and attracts additional visitors.
The Internet was abuzz last week after the announcement of Google’s new logo. What caught our eyes more than the artistic changes was this sentence on Google's blog: "building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes". Sounds exciting! But is it correct?
On top of that, the videos may need to be further manipulated to fit the graphic design of the web application, whether that entails cropping, resizing, rotating, trimming, adding overlays, or even applying filters and various effects.
Animated GIFs keep getting more and more popular, but they are generally very big images with slow loading times and high bandwidth costs, while the format itself is quite old and not optimized for modern video clips. As developers, you need to allow users to upload their animated GIF files, but you also need to deliver optimized images, which can be a complex, time consuming process.
Last month I was invited to speak at Daho.am, Munich's developers conference. This conference was organized by Stylight, a very successful fashion technology startup. Stylight signed up for a free Cloudinary account about 3 years ago and similarly to Cloudinary back then, Stylight were quite a young startup. Since then both companies have grown impressively together and Stylight are now a premium customer of Cloudinary, managing hundreds of millions of images.
Various factors can have an effect on the visual quality of photos captured by a wide variety of digital cameras. Technical limitations of cameras, coupled with changing conditions in which users take photos, results in a wide range of visual quality. Camera-related limitations arise from a combination of poor optics, noisy sensors, and the modest capabilities of mobile camera phones that are used to take photos in conditions that range from bright daylight to indoor scenes with incandescent light or even dark night scenes.
Responsive web design is a method of designing websites to provide an optimal viewing experience to users, irrespective of the device, window size, orientation, or resolution used to view the website. A site designed responsively adapts its layout to the viewing environment, resizing and moving elements dynamically and based on the properties of the browser or device the site is being displayed on.
When was the last time you've asked Google about your favorite band, movie star, or personal hobby? I can only assume that one of the first results that came up was from Answers.com. Nearly everyone knows this website, which is on the Quantcast Top 10 most visited sites in the world.
Many websites now offer their users the ability to upload images and profile pictures, making it a challenge for web designers to maintain a certain graphic design and style when subsequently displaying these images. The profile pictures may need to be smartly cropped to focus on the faces, with some sites that prefer close-ups of faces and others that prefer including more background when displaying images of people.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. For modern websites, a video surely takes the visual impact to a whole new level.
Nowadays, people enjoy the amazing capability of shooting videos with smartphone cameras that easily fit in their back pockets and are accessible nearly everywhere. Modern web applications have an opportunity to dramatically increase their visual impact by showcasing these videos online. Between news reports, user shared video snippets, explainer videos and ad campaigns, we see more and more videos appearing daily in our visited websites.
Rails is a great web development framework that was recently considered the coolest framework around. While other frameworks have gained popularity over time, Rails remains one of the most popular web development frameworks to date..
Update - April 2016: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on by Microsoft. See Facial attribute detection with Microsoft's Face API and the Advanced facial attributes detection add-on documentation.
Social networking sites allow users to upload images or other types of files that are immediately available to other users via news feeds or notifications. In some cases, attackers can directly spread infected files, but more commonly, they leverage the viral effect and the fact that users are simply unaware that their files are infected through sharing and collaborating with others. As a site owner or application developer, it is your responsibility to protect users and prevent these situations from occurring. Fortunately, Cloudinary makes this easier with its Metascan add-on.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on: Advanced Facial Attributes Detection
It is common for e-commerce, media, and news sites to remove image backgrounds or make them transparent in order to place the main element of the image on either white or color backgrounds. The final result better integrates an image into a site or specific page’s graphic design. For example, a fashion site that presents clothes or shoes should have the main element of a photo (e.g. shoes) extracted from the original image background, then edited to fit the site’s catalogue design and structure.
Front end developers may want to combine multiple images into a single image. For example, when creating and adding watermarks to stock photos, adding shapes or badges, preparing content for print (e.g. placing a logo on a t-shirt or a mug), adding a caption, and so on.
Image URLs tend to appear as a long list of random characters that are not intended for viewers and are not very useful to search engines. Concise and meaningful image file names are better for search engines to extract information about an image, therefore supporting your site's SEO ranking.
Photos today can be easily edited by means of resizing, cropping, adjusting the contrast, or changing an image’s format. As a result, new images are created that are similar to the original ones. Websites, web applications and mobile apps that allow user generated content uploads can benefit from identifying similar images.
Cloudinary offers you a comprehensive online interface that allows you to arrange and manage your image assets. With Cloudinary’s Media Library, you can easily view, upload, moderate, and search through your images. We recently enhanced this web interface with a new feature that allows you to instantly view semantic image data (descriptive image metadata), that is automatically extracted from your images.
Here at Cloudinary, we always strive to develop the best possible product, answer as many of our customers' needs and offer a superb support. Since launching 3 years ago we worked tirelessly to build the technology that empowers the Cloudinary product and supports our customers. While doing so, we haven’t really given a lot of love to our website design.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on by Imagga. See Automatic image categorization and tagging with Imagga and the Imagga Auto Tagging Add-on documentation.
