Sendify offers an online tool that simplifies logistics, creating a network for shippers and transport companies. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, Sendify’s combination of a freight network and transport management system enables companies to compare price and delivery times between leading carriers, book and track shipments.
Sendify started building two new websites to address the need for new site structures and implement new brand guidelines. The company wanted to add images on both websites to complement each text and provide visitors with a better experience. With these goals in mind, developers needed a better way to manage their image assets. Images were saved in different places – including local files on computers and in different folders on Google Drive. Developers embarked on a long scavenger hunt to identify where images resided, often searching up to ten minutes for a single image.
Adding to the complication and time spent was the labor-intensive process for transforming images. The task – even just the smallest changes to the images – required a graphic designer. With hundreds of images, and multiple transformations for each one, this process had the potential to take up the graphic designer’s valuable time and slowed down daily progress on the websites.
“Our website success was dependent on fixing these two problems in the simplest way possible,” said Niklas Vernersson, a digital marketer at Sendify. “We needed a solution that would enable us to store and transform pictures that were optimized for our websites. But we were budget conscious, too, and were seeking a way to accomplish our goals that wasn’t cost-prohibitive.”
When considering its image management options, one of Sendify’s developers recommended Cloudinary, which offers an end-to-end cloud-based image and video management solution. Web and mobile app developers use Cloudinary’s tools to streamline media management and deliver an optimal end user experience.
“Cloudinary is great,” said Vernersson. “This is one service that provides all the necessary tools first and foremost, for us, cloud storage and transformation – plus the ability to integrate with WordPress.”
Sendify has over 4,000 images stored in Cloudinary. Vernersson said that for every image Sendify uploads, it needs to do at least one transformation to ensure it is optimized for the websites and minimizes load time.
“We have not yet used Cloudinary to its full potential, in terms of image transformations,” he added. “However, we were able to get Cloudinary up and running in a couple of hours, quickly satisfying our needs for storage, manipulations and integration with our WordPress sites. As we’ve gotten more experience with Cloudinary, we see there is even greater potential in how we could use it in the future, too.”
Cloudinary is saving Sendify developers countless hours every week because the integrated storage and transformations make their processes more organized and enable them to find the exact images much more quickly. “Before we had issues remembering where a specific image was saved, which caused us a lot of frustration and wasted a lot of time,” Vernersson noted.
With Cloudinary, Vernersson added that Sendify now also can ensure that its two new websites are not bogged down by unoptimized images, which decreases page load time and results in a better experience for its customers.
