One of the most important things to know about compressing image files is that a smaller file size comes at the cost of a lower image quality. How much lower, and whether low enough to make a difference visually, depends on the image. Compression can be very effective at reducing the size of the image, and besides lowering the costs of storage space and bandwidth, a reduced image size goes a long way to retaining your users’ attention with faster, smaller downloads.
The Rolling Stones claim, “You can’t always get what you want”.
And when your application needs to crop hundreds or thousands of images to specific sizes within a strictly defined UI design, that frustrating Rolling Stones phrase may be ringing in your ears.
But maybe it doesn’t have to.
Developing a great website and maintaining it can be a challenging and time-consuming task, even for the most talented developer. You need to meet graphic design requirements for any device according to the latest design trends, and constantly find ways to optimize your website performance, for any browser.
We can save you a lot of time and effort. Cloudinary takes care of the entire image management pipeline: image upload, a rich set of manipulation and optimization capabilities, cloud storage, administration and super-fast CDN delivery.
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.
Every image is unique and every one of your website visitors is different. In a perfect world, we'd like to adapt each image individually to be "just right" for every user. With "just right" being perfectly cropped, using responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings and optimal quality with the best image format.
As a developer, you want to allow your users to download multiple files in a single click. An easy way to download multiple files and share them is to generate a ZIP file. When images are involved, you may also want to normalize the original images before including them in the ZIP file, by scaling them down to the same maximum resolution or converting them to the same format.
It's great to have the capability to manipulate images on the fly by using dynamic URLs to customize the images to fit the graphic design of your site or mobile application. However, what if you want to manipulate an image depending on a specific image characteristic (like its width or aspect ratio) or its contents (does it contain a face?). What you need is a way to apply a transformation to an image only if a specific condition is met. Take for example a situation where you have allocated space on your page for a user uploaded image with a width and height of 200 pixels. Furthermore, if the image contains a face you would like to zoom in and focus on the face itself, otherwise you would like to fit the entire image into the available space:
Many of the photos displayed on the internet these days are of people. If your website or mobile application displays photos that include people, you will want to make sure that their faces are included in the delivered images when cropping and manipulating them to fit your graphic design and responsive layout. You may even want to further manipulate an image according to the faces present, for example, adding a harlequin mask overlay on all of their eyes, where each mask is adjusted to the correct size and orientation (although not a typical use case, it's a cool example of using advanced facial attribute detection):
Perhaps some of you readers that have been around for a while remember our add-ons launch 2 years back, when we introduced a number of third party image processing products, fully integrated into the Cloudinary image management pipeline. Since then our add-ons marketplace has grown, both in our offerings and in usage. We now have 11 add-ons offering various capabilities and improvements.
Cloudinary’s JavaScript library accelerates web development by providing automated image manipulation and management with a few lines of code. The newly released version streamlines the library by providing a much requested jQuery-free core library. At the same time it is fully backward compatible with previous versions. The new library is further enhanced with classes and a chainable API, making the implementation of Cloudinary functionality in your application easier (and more enjoyable!).