Cloudinary Blog

So, your boss comes to you in a panic: he's just heard about Google's Core Web Vitals initiative and needs you to optimize the company website right now! "No problem," you say, hiding your fear that it's not something that can be done overnight. Just taking the first metric, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how can you possibly identify all the large elements - most likely images or video posters - of the many hundreds of pages that make up your site? There are already thousands of high-resolution (read massive) media files stored away, which marketing could use any time. How are you going to make sure they're all compressed to a size small enough to be delivered within the threshold? Not to mention all the new images and videos that will be created over time...

When it comes to quality versus quantity, you’ll often hear people say, “It’s the quality that counts, not the quantity”. While that’s true in many situations, there are also cases where you want both quality and quantity. You may have thousands of images on your website and you want them all to look great. This is especially important if your website allows users to upload their own content, for example, to sell their own products or services. You don't want their poor quality images to reflect badly on your brand.

“For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.” (Ted Lowe)

We often laugh about snooker (think billiards if you’ve never heard of snooker) commentaries back in the days of black and white television, but for approximately 300 million people worldwide, the seemingly simple task of distinguishing colors is a daily challenge. Color blindness, or Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), affects roughly one in twelve men, and one in two hundred women. That's over 8% of the population - a significant percentage of your potential customers who may be missing vital information or unable to engage fully with your site. Couple that with increasing legislation promoting accessibility and it's easy to see why you should care about color.

If you’ve come across this post and, based on the title, are expecting insights into object-oriented programming languages, then please forgive me for overloading the term object-oriented. I hope you don’t object when you discover that the objects in this post are not so much the instantiated class types, but real-life objects found in images. It is helpful though if you’re familiar with the likes of Java, PHP, Javascript or other popular frameworks, as you’ll be able to implement these automatic image cropping techniques in your code. Anyway, let’s cut to the chase - or should that be crop to the object...?

Following Naveen's post on integrating Cloudinary into your Shopify store, here are all the technical details you need to:

Note that the above tasks are just the starting points for making Cloudinary DAM work with Shopify through APIs and showcasing the benefits, not an official procedure for integrating Cloudinary with Shopify. Feel free to expand on these tasks to create your own solutions.

“Anything you can do, I can do better,
I can do anything better than you…” (Irving Berlin)

If the Cloudinary CLI could sing, this could well be its song. Virtually anything you can do with the Cloudinary upload and admin APIs, you can do with the CLI (Command Line Interface), and much of the functionality that’s available through your account console is also accessible through the CLI. As to being ‘better’, it probably depends on the context, but in many situations it’s certainly quicker and easier, and it provides some bonus functionality that isn’t available through the APIs or console.