Cloudinary Blog

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.

There are a lot of cool and useful marketing technology and tools available today. As a part of the marketing team at Cloudinary, we must identify and recommend the solutions that will scale and optimize our ability to reach, and effectively engage with, our prospects. One of the most critical tools, perhaps, is a digital asset management (DAM) solution, which I discussed in an earlier article here.

Because images dominate page weight, methodical image optimization can have a significant effect on conversions and user experience. And the performance tools you choose to use can have a powerful impact on how websites are built and maintained. One such popular open source tool is WebPagetest. It is designed to measure and analyze webpage performance, which is why Cloudinary chose to partner with our friends over there to launch Website Speed Test.

Everyone is a content producer today - from the largest publishing house and entertainment studio, down to the smallest ecommerce store, corporate website or personal blog.

If content is the lifeblood of your website or application, images and videos form the heart that makes it tick and creates an emotional connection with the audience. But, using images and videos to make the content visually engaging and meet your conversion goals, you face a new challenge: managing your digital assets. Because the images and videos are created by different teams for different channels - such as website, social media, ecommerce store, blogs, partners and digital agencies to name a few - chaos can ensue.