Cloudinary Blog

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.

Controlling who can access your images and videos, and when, can be an important concern for your business and security workflow. You may have resources that you only want some of your users or employees to access, or you may need to make sure that your original resources are secure, and only transformed (edited) versions of your resources are delivered, e.g., with a watermark or logo displayed.

One of the main optimization challenges for website and mobile developers is how to display sufficiently high quality images to their visitors while minimizing the image file size. A smaller image file size can lead to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and an improved user experience. The problem is that reducing the file size too much may lead to a lower image quality and could harm visitor satisfaction. Delivering an optimized image with just the right balance between size and quality can be quite tricky.

One of the most important things to know about compressing image files is that a smaller file size comes at the cost of a lower image quality. How much lower, and whether low enough to make a difference visually, depends on the image. Compression can be very effective at reducing the size of the image, and besides lowering the costs of storage space and bandwidth, a reduced image size goes a long way to retaining your users’ attention with faster, smaller downloads.

As a developer, you want to allow your users to download multiple files in a single click. An easy way to download multiple files and share them is to generate a ZIP file. When images are involved, you may also want to normalize the original images before including them in the ZIP file, by scaling them down to the same maximum resolution or converting them to the same format.