Cloudinary Blog

For Stylight, a fashion and design retail search engine, uptime, performance and customer experience are key to the bottom line. With tens of thousands of new images being added to its site each week, and a very small development team, the company needed an efficient way to manage and manipulate images, so they could be viewed quickly and optimally on any device used by consumers in 16 countries. As one of the earliest users of Cloudinary, Stylight sees significant performance and financial benefits related to Cloudinary’s cutting-edge solution for image optimization and delivery on multiple content delivery networks (CDNs).

ClickMechanic, a London-based, online marketplace for automobile mechanics, has chosen Cloudinary as its media-asset manager for over five years. James Wozniak, ClickMechanic’s full-stack software developer, recently talked with us about the company’s experience with Cloudinary.

The future of marketing depends on dynamic visual experiences. Marketers must connect with customers across multiple channels – the web, mobile, kiosks, email, search, and social as well as print and real time events. They must build brand awareness in increasingly noisy (and competitive) marketplaces. To rise above the noise, marketers must become well-versed in all things rich media -- using images, short and long form videos, and interactive contents in new ways to raise awareness, deliver powerful experiences, and boost engagement.

As Stencil’s founders were developing a web-based design tool for small businesses and other organizations that couldn’t afford to hire a graphic designer, they needed an image management solution that would render, manipulate, and resize images within each design. Cloudinary’s rich set of functionalities enabled Stencil to avoid the hassles and complexity of building their own image management product, while providing users with an easy-to-use means for doing image transformations and delivering final designs that are sized perfectly for their needs.

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.

When creating a website that allows campers to discover great destinations, Hipcamp put a strong emphasis on featuring high-quality images that showcased the list of beautiful locations, regardless of whether users accessed the site on a desktop, tablet, or phone. Since 2015, Hipcamp has relied on Cloudinary’s image management solution to automate cropping and image optimization, enabling instant public delivery of photos, automatic tagging based on content recognition, and faster loading of webpages. In addition, Hipcamp was able to maintain the high standards it holds for the look and feel of its website.

Complex Networks has been using Cloudinary since 2014 to manage and optimize images across seven websites and two mobile apps, making editorial workflow more efficient, improving page performance and load time, and increasing user engagement. Cloudinary was instrumental in enabling Complex Networks to redesign its web properties. Without the flexibility that Cloudinary offers to both creative and development teams, it would not have been possible for Complex Networks to achieve such a fast time to market.

Fairfax Media Limited [ASX:FXJ] is one of the largest media companies in Australia and New Zealand that engages audiences and communities via print and digital media. It includes recognizable mastheads including The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Fairfax Media operates numerous news and information websites, as well as tablet and smartphone apps, for online news sites.

Bleacher Report is a global digital destination for sports fans, creating and collaborating on content at the intersection of sports and culture. Owned by Turner, a division of Time Warner, Bleacher Report's website and social channels focus on sports culture for the next generation of fans. Bleacher Report also has a five-star mobile app and popular email newsletters, which are part of the company’s strategy for instantly delivering in-depth articles, results and video highlights personalized for users’ favorite teams, players and leagues.

To create a profile, Hinge users initially had to connect their Facebook and/or Instagram accounts to the app, which would import images to the users’ Hinge profiles. Hinge stored those images with a URL that expired after two months, unless the user logged into the app regularly. This aspect of the app was frustrating for users because the photos would become inaccessible for others to view.