Here at Cloudinary, we provide a cloud-based tool that enables our users to compress images and video for their websites and apps. Our goal is to preserve the visual integrity of the content, but deliver the smallest file size to any device or browser to ultimately optimize website performance and end user satisfaction.
Managing media files (processing, storage and manipulation) is one of the biggest challenges we encounter as practical developers. These challenges include:
A great service called Cloudinary can help us overcome many of these challenges. Together with Cloudinary, let's work on solutions to these challenges and hopefully have a simpler mental model towards media management.
Last week, I was invited to an exclusive hackathon to build apps for musicians. The app team I was assigned to was tasked with building a video upload site for Bounce videos. Bounce is a style of music that originated in New Orleans. The app would be called BounceDotCom.com and there were plans to have Big Freedia, the Queen of Bounce, promote it. I knew the organizer could make things happen, so I jumped at the chance.
Developing a library requires a different approach from developing an application. You must consider the use of the library in someone else’s application and design for it. React is well suited for this purpose. And if the library you are creating is an adapter to another library, you can dynamically generate the component's properties definition to ensure they are forward compatible. There is however more than one way to achieve the same goal, with some conventions to follow and others to cautiously not follow. In particular, I chose to use the context function even though it is an experimental feature because it is useful when you don’t know, or can’t dictate, the way your library's components will be utilized.
When images are involved, web developers have a large set of relevant tools at their disposal. You can display images in your web sites and mobile applications. You can manipulate and transform such images using image editing and manipulation software or cloud-based solutions like Cloudinary. But there are other types of data embedded in image files that can add unique semantic information to the images and are hardly ever used.
Different online services, websites and mobile applications have very different image management requirements. Despite the differences, the image management pipeline boils down to the same basic formula - upload the images, normalize them, store them and manipulate them to create derivatives (thumbnails, effects, watermarks, etc.). Afterwards, prepare them for delivery and make sure they are accessible to your users quickly and efficiently when browsing your website or using your mobile app.