Cloudinary Blog

Recently we added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. This app demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart. At the time, we published Introducing the Cloudinary Demo Android App, Part 1, which provided an under-the-hood tour of how the eCommerce Android App was designed and how Cloudinary was integrated throughout.

At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals. Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for all your image and video needs, including upload, storage, administration, manipulation, optimization and dynamic delivery.

Cloudinary has recently added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. The App demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart.

As you may have heard, Cloudinary, the end-to-end media management solution, now has a certified cartridge with Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware), one of the industry's most agile and scalable e-commerce platforms. The Cloudinary cartridge enables you to simplify and automate the process of manipulating, optimizing, and delivering images and videos throughout your entire Commerce Cloud store, including product images and videos, category assets, and site catalogs.

The value of categorizing all the images in your library cannot be underestimated. Besides the obvious advantage of making your image library searchable and displaying relevant content to your users based on their interests, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload, and find out what people care about and look for. However, when dealing with a large volume of images, manually categorizing the images would take up too much time and resources.

Due to significant growth of the web and improvements in network bandwidth, video is now a major source of information and entertainment shared over the internet. As a developer or asset manager, making corporate videos available for viewing, not to mention user-uploaded videos, means you also need a way to categorize them according to their content and make your video library searchable. Most systems end up organizing their video by metadata like the filename, or with user-generated tags (e.g., youtube). This sort of indexing method is subjective, inconsistent, time-consuming, incomplete and superficial.

Knowledge is power. And if you allow your users to upload images, you also probably want to better understand what their images contain. Whether a photo is of a building, people, animals, celebrities, or a product, image processing and analysis can assist in further comprehension. The benefits of this knowledge can go beyond "merely" categorizing your content and making your image library searchable: drawing insights from user generated content can be very useful! What better way to learn more about your users than to analyze the images they upload and find out what they care about and then have the ability to display relevant content to them according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.

Allowing your users to upload their own images to your website can increase user engagement, retention and monetization. However, allowing your users to upload any image they want to, may lead to some of your users uploading inappropriate images to your application. These images may offend other users or even cause your site to violate standards or regulations.

Developing applications for mobile consumption requires facing, and overcoming, some difficult challenges. Apps need to limit their RAM, CPU and battery usage while still performing the required tasks in a reasonable time frame. If too many background tasks are running, the mobile device can become sluggish, with the battery running out very quickly. Coordination with other apps is crucial to keep the device responsive and make the battery last longer.

How you present the content of your website can be just as important as the content itself. The images you display need to conform to the graphic design of your site, and every image needs to fit within a predefined size. Although that may be simple enough to achieve when you are dealing with your own images, the task can be more challenging when displaying images uploaded by your users.