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.
Responsive web design is a method of designing websites to provide an optimal viewing experience to users, irrespective of the device, window size, orientation, or resolution used to view the website. A site designed responsively adapts its layout to the viewing environment, resizing and moving elements dynamically and based on the properties of the browser or device the site is being displayed on.
Many websites now offer their users the ability to upload images and profile pictures, making it a challenge for web designers to maintain a certain graphic design and style when subsequently displaying these images. The profile pictures may need to be smartly cropped to focus on the faces, with some sites that prefer close-ups of faces and others that prefer including more background when displaying images of people.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. For modern websites, a video surely takes the visual impact to a whole new level.
Nowadays, people enjoy the amazing capability of shooting videos with smartphone cameras that easily fit in their back pockets and are accessible nearly everywhere. Modern web applications have an opportunity to dramatically increase their visual impact by showcasing these videos online. Between news reports, user shared video snippets, explainer videos and ad campaigns, we see more and more videos appearing daily in our visited websites.
Rails is a great web development framework that was recently considered the coolest framework around. While other frameworks have gained popularity over time, Rails remains one of the most popular web development frameworks to date..
Update - April 2016: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on by Microsoft. See Facial attribute detection with Microsoft's Face API and the Advanced facial attributes detection add-on documentation.
Social networking sites allow users to upload images or other types of files that are immediately available to other users via news feeds or notifications. In some cases, attackers can directly spread infected files, but more commonly, they leverage the viral effect and the fact that users are simply unaware that their files are infected through sharing and collaborating with others. As a site owner or application developer, it is your responsibility to protect users and prevent these situations from occurring. Fortunately, Cloudinary makes this easier with its Metascan add-on.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on: Advanced Facial Attributes Detection