Cloudinary Blog

Cloudinary offers an interesting feature: The ability to generate images from the PDF files and pages. With Cloudinary, you can create thumbnail images of your documents for previewing purposes. It's useful when you don't want to grant user access to the content, but need to give them a sneak peek of what they're missing if they haven’t downloaded the PDF yet.

Images are crucial to website performance, but most still don't implement responsive images. It’s not just about fitting an image on the screen, but also making the the image size relatively rational to the device. The srcset and sizes options, which are your best hit are hard to implement. Cloudinary provides an easier way, which we will discuss in this article.

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Managing media files (processing, storage and manipulation) is one of the biggest challenges we encounter as practical developers. These challenges include:

A great service called Cloudinary can help us overcome many of these challenges. Together with Cloudinary, let's work on solutions to these challenges and hopefully have a simpler mental model towards media management.

As a developer, it seems inefficient to serve a 2000kb JPEG image when we could compress images to optimize the performance without degrading the visual quality.

We are not new to this kind of responsibility. But our productivity will end up being questioned if we do not deliver fast. In order to do so, the community has devised several patterns to help improve productivity. Let's review few of these patterns based on their categories:

Note from Cloudinary: Christian Nwamba, a frequent Cloudinary contributor, recently attended, and was a main speaker, at the Google Developer Group (GDG) Conference in Lagos, Nigeria. Christian led a session teaching more than 500 developers how to “Build Offline Apps for the Next Billion Users.” The stack he used included JS (Vue), Firebase, Service Workers and Cloudinary. Below is his account of the conference and his talk.

If you intend to build a photo gallery online, you have to seriously consider how to protect the images from users who are not buying them. While visitors need to see the picture before purchasing, there needs to be a way to ensure that even serious buyers are not tempted to use the images without agreeing to your license terms.

As a developer, you hope and anticipate that your website or mobile application will be accessed by different users on various devices. To improve the user-experience, irrespective of the viewing device, you need to make sure that each image adapts to different graphic layouts, device resolutions and other viewing requirements. For example, for an E-Commerce site, one image will be displayed on different pages — home page, product page, shopping cart and more — and will be viewed on a desktop, cellphone or a tablet. This means that you need to create numerous versions of every image and for a website with hundreds of images, manual manipulation is not scalable.

Media makes up the majority of today's website content. While it makes websites more interesting for visitors, media presents challenges because these images and videos are more difficult to store, deliver and manipulate on-the-fly to suit any given situation.

This article was originally posted on Scotch.io

React is a good tool when it comes to building flexible and reusable UI components. However, it's "one of those libraries" that cannot handle all the tasks involved in building a full fleshed UI project. Other supporting tools - such as a recently announced React SDK from Cloudinary - are available to provide solutions that the React core cannot.

The most challenging aspect of building a product with a front-end framework is focusing on the complexity of the tool rather than the complexity of the actual problem being solved. It’s perhaps more frustrating when the tool is complex but the problem is a simple one (e.g. complex webpack config for a todo app). The term progressive, is used by Vue.js to describe how this challenge can be mitigated. Building a basic demo or small app? Vue.js is simple enough to handle that. How about a complex enterprise app? Vue.js is capable of produce cutting-edge solutions, as well.