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 eCommerce 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.
Cloudinary helps Baby’s Firsts App deliver images quickly and preserve consistency from app to print. Baby’s Firsts is a free iPhone app that helps parents collect photos, instantly share photos via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and produce photo albums of their baby’s first year. Using more than 300 creative, developmentally timed reminders to capture key moments and milestones, the easy-to-navigate app enables parents to store photos in the cloud and create customized photo pages that are then transformed into heirloom-quality, printed baby books.
Even though the image format animated GIFs are gaining popularity, their file size is usually large, causing slow loading and incurring high bandwidth costs. Besides, the GIF format is old and not optimized for modern video clips. The developer’s job of effecting fast loading of animated GIFs and delivering optimized images is complex and time-consuming.
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.
