If you have a web site or mobile application, chances are you need to deliver a lot of media resources, especially images, to your users. How would you know if all your images were delivered correctly to your users and if there were no broken images displayed on your website? Maybe you build image URLs based on a certain naming convention and you end up with URLs that point to non-existing images, which result in HTTP status errors and broken images? Maybe search engines like Google have indexed the URLs of your images that were subsequently deleted or modified, and these URLs now generate errors when accessed?
Are you delivering your site via HTTPS or considering it? You're not alone - in 2015 the number of sites running on HTTPS almost doubled. Both consumers and web developers are now much more aware of the value of the humble green lock displayed in the address bar. The benefits of using HTTPS extend beyond the customer’s safety, to SEO boosts, and advanced functionalities that are only available when delivering via HTTPS, such as HTTP/2 and WebRTC.
It can be quite a challenge to graphically design a website or mobile application that displays images in very precise shapes and orientations. This can take the form of warping 2D pictures to have a 3D perspective, placing images in precise shapes or overlaying images in specific locations within another image, for example: overlaying an image over the screen of a smartphone.
Over the past few months Inviqa have been working to build an official plugin to simplify the process of adding Cloudinary to the 100,000s of Magento sites around the world. Inviqa is one of Magento’s largest partners in Europe and has been working with customers to integrate Cloudinary and ensure that the plugin can cater to a Magento store’s needs.
At Cloudinary, we always seek to seamlessly leverage the best optimized image formats for any of the different use cases for web and mobile applications. Therefore, we quickly added support for FLIF: uploading of FLIF files and dynamic conversion of any image format to FLIF or from FLIF.
If you have an application that allows users to upload their own photos, it can be very useful to be able to organize these photos according to their content. This will allow you to categorize the content for displaying to all your users and make your image library searchable. Furthermore, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload and find different trends of what people care about. Other added benefits can also include the ability to display matching content to your users according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
So what do you display when you need something to uniquely and visually represent an audio file? A useful solution is to display a waveform image, also referred to as soundwave image, which is a visual representation of the audio file and is presented as a graph of the sound amplitude against time.
On top of that, the videos may need to be further manipulated to fit the graphic design of the web application, whether that entails cropping, resizing, rotating, trimming, adding overlays, or even applying filters and various effects.
Animated GIFs keep getting more and more popular, but they are generally very big images with slow loading times and high bandwidth costs, while the format itself is quite old and not optimized for modern video clips. As developers, you need to allow users to upload their animated GIF files, but you also need to deliver optimized images, which can be a complex, time consuming process.
Various factors can have an effect on the visual quality of photos captured by a wide variety of digital cameras. Technical limitations of cameras, coupled with changing conditions in which users take photos, results in a wide range of visual quality. Camera-related limitations arise from a combination of poor optics, noisy sensors, and the modest capabilities of mobile camera phones that are used to take photos in conditions that range from bright daylight to indoor scenes with incandescent light or even dark night scenes.