Posts by Mickey Aharony

Cloudinary SDKs offer numerous cutting-edge and effective ways for managing and delivering media online. An example is the Cloudinary AI Content Analysis add-on with which you can locate text in photos and automatically crop images through a facial-detection capability.  Now in beta testing is the AI-powered interactive video…

Personalized web content, which raises conversion and boosts retention, time on site, and page views, is key for maintaining a competitive advantage. A November 2021 McKinsey study found that personalization drives better business performance and meets customer expectations:  Nearly three-fourths (71%) of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions…

Nowadays, even though many people are minting, hosting, and distributing nonfungible tokens (NFTs) for their creative work, a misconception prevails that NFTs are synonymous with the art pieces that are sold. In fact, NFTs—the smart contract itself and the data inside—are blockchain tokens that certify ownership, i.e., small containers in…

No matter your business focus—public service, B2B integration, recruitment—multimedia, in particular video, is remarkably effective in communicating with the audience. Before, making video accessible to diverse viewers involved tasks galore, such as eliciting the service of production studios to manually dub, transcribe, and add subtitles. Those operations were costly and…

In today’s digital age, businesses must deliver to all viewing devices visual media that tells their brand’s story. To do so, the digital content must be in one place as the single source of truth for use by the entire organization. Additionally, syndicating an ever-growing library of media assets for…

In November 2021, Cloudinary teamed up with Dolby.io to participate in their Build the World With Dolby.io Hackathon aimed at sparking spectacular and innovative hybrid audio- and video-conference experiences. Invited were developers and creators from around the world to compete for a prize pool valued at over…

“Holistic accessibility … provide[s] people with disabilities the best chance to achieve equality.” — Sheri Byrne-Haber As digital technology advances, video is gaining popularity across industries, replete with entertaining, engaging, and coherent content. All too often, however, not everyone can access it for various reasons. Built-in accessibility for video, which…

Now that telecommuting for work will likely continue to be the norm, people are communicating more and more by audio and video. In fact, many professional creators are now running projects from their home setup. Not all digital content is created equal, however. Audio quality, for one thing, is a…

User-generated content (UGC) took off with, first of all, the advent of the internet and, subsequently, social networks. Everyday consumers were given keys to the kingdom, so to speak, so that they, too, could compose and post content, simultaneously engaging with others online. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—the networks…

Many content creators and consumers tend to regard video as visuals, but that’s only part of the experience. Immersive video content includes strong audio. Just like in a movie, the audio for video content comprises many components: the narrator or subjects, the background music that sets the mood and draws…

User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful marketing tool. Not only does video complement marketing efforts for e-commerce by enabling customers to explore products in greater detail, but UGC also adds an element of trust. As a bonus, user-generated video is an exceptional opportunity for e-businesses to attract website traffic…

Resizing images with JavaScript (JS) creates nifty effects, many of which you cannot do in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). However, even though you can automate a zoom effect with JS to enable users to zoom in and out of images, limitations abound. This article shows you how to resize…

CSS image overlays are a common technique for transposing text or images over each other. For example, you can combine images and text on a website when captioning an image, or place a live text element over a button. CSS image overlays can be a solid color, a gradient,…

Rich and engaging media helps build customer engagement and trust but can be time consuming to stage. Developers could save a tremendous amount of time by preparing videos for social media with Cloudinary. That’s because Cloudinary’s interface, widgets, and application programming interface (API) transform raw media into polished content, optimizing…

As critical as it is to engage with shoppers in order to succeed in e-commerce, old-style, boring emails are far from being effective. In fact, they tend to be annoying because no one likes to read formulaic, generic messages that are sent en masse. For better results, rethink your email…

Imagery and video are proven ways to promote engagement and conversion on e-commerce sites. One study found that 75% of online shoppers say that product pictures are “very influential” for their purchase decisions, with a respondent commenting, “If I can’t see it, I can’t make a decision about it.”…

Modern webpages are more than just plain text. With HTML5, it’s no longer a challenge to play media on webpages. You can—and should—provide your audience with an engaging, high-quality multimedia experience on your site. Leading brands, such as Peloton and Allbirds, gain a competitive edge by engaging with…

For years, Google has been updating its search algorithm to prioritize end-user experience, displaying the most relevant and helpful content at the top of search results. The latest—and maybe the most significant—update so far is Core Web Vitals (CWVs), which are new metrics announced a year ago that will,…

You’ve likely heard of the increasingly popular catchphrase headless architecture in technical or marketing discussions vis-a-vis building a martech stack for headless e-commerce. You might also understand the headless concept of open APIs and their benefits. However, as impressed as you might be by the headless architecture’s advantages, you hesitate…

Think about the last time you bought something online—and about the last time you did that but what you purchased wasn’t something you were after when you opened your browser. What captured your attention in the search results, the assortment page, or the product page that convinced you to make…

With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can style your site and transform the related images. For example, you can create static or sticky positioning for the graphics, define backgrounds and borders, resize, and create cool filters to show off the artistry. CSS offers numerous options for those tasks. Gratifyingly, CSS…

With JavaScript (JS), you can create cool image animations, which are difficult to do with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article describes how to— Dynamically rotate or flip images with JS. Automatically rotate and remove image backgrounds with Cloudinary. Here are the topics: Dynamically rotating images with JS…

You can transform images with CSS image filters, applying popular effects like blur, brightness, contrast, drop shadow, grayscale, hue, invert, opacity, saturate, and sepia. With Cloudinary, image-transformation tasks, such as blurring or pixelating faces, adjusting brightness and contrast, and transferring image styles, are much simpler and often automated. This…

Image effects, which you can set up with CSS, define how images are served to users. This article describes how to create basic effects, image hover, and animated images through parameter configurations in your main CSS stylesheet and—much faster and dynamically—in Cloudinary. Here are the topics: Creating basic…

With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can change the size and aspect ratio of images and backgrounds. Three resizing options are available: absolute resizing, retention of the aspect ratio, and relative resizing. You can also scale and fill backgrounds. However, those are all manual chores that take time, skill,…

A product’s benefits and usage, including its value proposition, features, and instructive details, are best demonstrated through video. Depending on the funnel, channel, and audience, product-video types vary, the most popular ones being demos, reviews, installation, and how-tos. Creating effective product videos can be a massive undertaking for novices.

You likely find yourself continually editing images for enhancement by eliminating flaws and tweaking the overall presentation, typically with software tools. Examples of basic editing are straightening, cleaning, and cropping images, as well as adjusting the contrast, exposure, and white balance. With advanced software like Cloudinary, you can automate not…

Measuring the level of interest your videos generate helps you produce compelling content. The measurement and optimization approach must, however, address the various aspects of each video, including the A/B test hypothesis and iterations. A high engagement rate spells effective videos; a low engagement rate calls for content improvement.

Image formats, which are standards for digital images, can be uncompressed, compressed, raster based, or vector based. You determine the DNA of your images with the formats you adopt, each of which offering different capabilities. For example, rasters generate images with pixels; vectors, with vectors or proportional formulas. PNGs can…

In today’s digital-first age, online site performance is critical for ensuring business continuity, attracting repeat sales, and gaining a competitive advantage. Lazy loading accelerates performance for websites and apps. Many implementation techniques are available, however, so choose wisely. In particular, become familiar with the universal practices and the language-…

React is a popular open-source JavaScript library for creating user interfaces (UIs) for single-page web applications, with React Native slated for building mobile apps. Helpfully, React organizes UIs into collections of reusable components, rendering feature management a cakewalk. However, to boost user engagement, conversion, and SEO ranking, you…

Shortcut to Cloudinary’s solution As lightweight versions of native apps, progressive web apps (PWAs) offer a reliable, instantly installable version of traditional apps. This post explains the inner workings of PWAs, describes the best practices for developing PWAs, and clues you in to…

JavaScript is a popular programming language, typically for building interactive web apps, thanks to its ease of use and ability to run in any browser with no “JavaScript turned off” setting. The language is easy to learn, accelerating app development. However, to avoid performance issues, be sure to optimize your…

Originally developed for Apple, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a video-streaming protocol, supported by Android and other mobile platforms. HLS uses adaptive bitrate to adjust video quality to each viewer’s internet speed and device capabilities. Presently, HLS is mandatory for live streaming on certain mobile devices and most HTML5…

Angular is a popular open-source framework that offers a simplified process for building web applications. The framework is based on TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript—with additional features like static typing, interfaces, and classes—that promotes component-based development, ensuring that components are decoupled and easily reusable. Images are a critical factor of…

In today’s Visual Web, images and videos, collectively called digital assets, catch the eyes of audiences much more readily than text, hence the predominant need to make digital assets engaging and compelling. Creating them is just the start, however. Other challenges are nontrivial and daunting, including the following: How and…

In the web-design arena, what you don’t see can hurt you. Worse, it could damage your brand’s reputation, let alone hurt the bottom line. I’m talking about images, which can consume a lot of bandwidth, upwards of 70 percent in some sites. Viewing them incurs a cost on your…

William (iChuloo) Imoh, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, recently embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, February 20-March 12, during which he powwowed with technical and product teams and communities at such renowned enterprises as Netlify, Pluralsight, Lucidchart, Twilio, and more in Salt Lake City, Dallas,…

ClickMechanic, a London-based, online marketplace for automobile mechanics, has chosen Cloudinary as its media-asset manager for over five years. James Wozniak, ClickMechanic’s full-stack software developer, recently talked with us about the company’s experience with Cloudinary. The Cloudinary Choice “A high priority for us as an online business is to…

Unoptimized images can be incredible bottlenecks that turn an otherwise well-built web page into a slow loading, bloated one. With the ever-increasing percentage of users on mobile devices, properly sizing and optimizing images to provide a good mobile experience is even more important. When working with content creators: Train the…

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…

Video is an increasingly important component for websites – whether it’s to inform visitors, enhance user experience or support sales and marketing efforts. But delivering high-quality video at large scale can be quite a challenge. You need to consider encoding, format, bandwidth usage, delivery and the devices on which…

Talk Summary You might have read some tutorials or articles explaining the importance of images and how to optimize them to deliver a great experience to your users. But does this work really translate into wins for your company? In this talk, you see real-world examples of the positive impact…

Talk Summary It took nearly four years, four proposed standards, the formation of a community group, and a funding campaign to pay for development, but we finally got what we’ve been clamoring for—a solution for responsive images baked into browsers. Now the hard work begins. Jason Grigsby is co-founder…

Thrillophilia is India’s largest online tours and activities platform. Through its website and app, the company offers a one-stop solution for travelers looking for tours, activities and things to do. Users can choose from more than 10,000 activities in 200+ cities in India and 15 countries in Asia. Headquartered…

Video is an increasingly important component for websites and apps, as consumer demand for and consumption of video content is growing. It’s not only for wired devices, though. More and more, consumers are accessing video where they want it, when they want it, on whatever device that…

Cloudinary offers a cloud-based solution to help developers manage and optimize rich media (images and videos). With images being ubiquitous in online content, image sliders, which rotate banners or enable browsing through multiple images with animation effects and…

The most common frustrations voiced by people when visiting a website are the time it takes for pages to load and the amount of bandwidth some sites eat from their monthly mobile plans. What these users might not realize is that, in many cases, the culprit is the same: website…

At the end of 2014, activity on smartphones and tablets accounted for 60% of the time Americans spent online, according to comScore. Given the fast migration to mobile, these figures have been growing every year, and this trend in migration is not limited to the US market…

Back in 2013, Cloudinary published a blog post entitled “Top 10 Mistakes in Handling Website Images”. Though these top 10 mistakes still hold true, we’ve come up with a few additional points that we thought you’d find of interest. As the number of images and videos on a website…