Cloudinary Blog

Laravel, currently the most popular PHP framework, offers databases an efficient, well-written Active Record implementation, called the Eloquent Object-Relational Mapper (ORM). Specifically, Eloquent maps a database table to an Eloquent model along with fluent methods and expressions for querying and modifying the database’s records.

I work as director of web development at Valtech in Paris, France. Also, I’m a Cloudinary media developer expert (MDE), a content creator, and a developer. Follow me at @timbenniks and at youtube.com/timbenniks.

Since performance is by and large the holy grail of software development, tools abound for building fast software, notably those for optimizing online media, most of which are images and videos. Optimization in this context means downsizing the media files but maintaining a satisfactory level of visual quality for delivery. The smaller those files are, the faster your website loads.

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 only editing tasks, such as quality adjustment and encoding, but also delivery.

Overlaying text on images is a versatile and effective way in which to spotlight captions, names, copyright watermarks, and such. You can also overlay text over dynamic images (advertisement banners, coupons, greeting cards, business cards) in e-commerce-oriented emails.

User-generated content (UGC) can take many forms, the two main ones being images and videos. Part 1 of this series explains the basics of UGC and its benefits to e-commerce. Here in part 2, we’ll show you how to take advantage of UGC images in e-commerce and to upload, transform, and deliver them fast and seamlessly with Cloudinary.

These days, e-commerce websites are trending clean and sleek, almost always spotlighting high-quality product photos with a flat-white, solid-color, or transparent background. Many practical and well-validated reasons support this choice, making it clear that this is no passing fad. This graphic illustrates a few of them:

At TedsVintageArt.com, we digitally restore historic maps and sell their art prints on multiple platforms, such as Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and Houzz. As our operations ramped up years ago, it took an inordinately long time to generate custom images for our products. Plus, since we sell art, it behooves us to produce multiple high-quality images for each print, which was another time-consuming task.

As a 20-year online leader in travel and leisure retail, Europe-based public company lastminute.com along with its 1,200 employees are committed to enriching the lives of vacationers through comprehensive and enticing products and services. Beyond flight deals and tours, it's the images and videos, whether of that luxury villa in Greece, romantic Parisian street, or exotic stroll through the Marrakech markets, that attract audiences and boost bookings.