Everyone knows the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. But what most people don’t realize about images is what needs to be taken into consideration when using them on websites and in mobile apps.
There’s no debating the fact that including images on your website or mobile app draws the interest of users and leads to stronger engagement. For example, posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts, according to a WebDAM infographic. Use of attention-grabbing images is only going to grow. Consider that by 2018, 84 percent of communication will be visual, the infographic noted.
Images – if you’re a developer, there’s no doubt that at one time or another, you’ve probably worked with a lot of image files, and may have been tasked with ensuring a top-notch user experience or continually improving website and app performance. You may have posed questions on online message boards, or sought advice from your developer colleagues. But there hasn’t been a conference that solely focused on image management…until now.
Last week, 15 of us here at Cloudinary headed back to Las Vegas for the annual AWS re:Invent conference. We returned as exhibitors again this year since we had such a successful experience in 2015, when we introduced Cloudinary to many new companies that could benefit from our image and video management tools.
Attending our first Velocity Web Performance Conference, we wanted to WOW attendees with the Cloudinary solution. And WOW them we did, with the announcement of our new “Images Solved” enhancements, which offer fully automated content- and context-aware image adaptation.
We spent part of last week at The O'Reilly Fluent Conference 2016 in San Francisco, taking the opportunity to show off the impressive image and video transformation capabilities of Cloudinary to the developer community.
Usually we spend a lot of time working with and talking to developers, helping them address the challenges of managing media on their websites. Last week, we got a different perspective when we met with marketing and product pros at eTail West, an annual event for ecommerce and multichannel retailers that took place in Palm Springs.
Last week I was part of a three member Cloudinary team that attended and exhibited at Web Summit 2015 in Dublin. Just in the last four years, the event has grown from a few hundred people to more than 42,000 people from 134 countries who attended this year.
Cloudinary helps Baby’s Firsts App deliver images quickly and preserve consistency from app to print. Baby’s Firsts is a free iPhone app that helps parents collect photos, instantly share photos via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and produce photo albums of their baby’s first year. Using more than 300 creative, developmentally timed reminders to capture key moments and milestones, the easy-to-navigate app enables parents to store photos in the cloud and create customized photo pages that are then transformed into heirloom-quality, printed baby books.