Cloudinary Blog

Allowing your users to upload their own images to your website can increase user engagement, retention and monetization. However, allowing your users to upload any image they want to, may lead to some of your users uploading inappropriate images to your application. These images may offend other users or even cause your site to violate standards or regulations.

Great content is hard to come by. You can invest a lot of time and effort in building a great media library, but if content managers and editors can't quickly find what they need at the right time, it's almost useless (and frustrating). Good search capabilities allow you to provide them with a better experience: present relevant content or a well-organized catalog by a variety of criteria such as tags, folders, size, resolution, aspect ratio, faces, colors and many more.

This article was originally posted on Scotch.io

React is a good tool when it comes to building flexible and reusable UI components. However, it's "one of those libraries" that cannot handle all the tasks involved in building a full fleshed UI project. Other supporting tools - such as a recently announced React SDK from Cloudinary - are available to provide solutions that the React core cannot.

The most challenging aspect of building a product with a front-end framework is focusing on the complexity of the tool rather than the complexity of the actual problem being solved. It’s perhaps more frustrating when the tool is complex but the problem is a simple one (e.g. complex webpack config for a todo app). The term progressive, is used by Vue.js to describe how this challenge can be mitigated. Building a basic demo or small app? Vue.js is simple enough to handle that. How about a complex enterprise app? Vue.js is capable of produce cutting-edge solutions, as well.

Thrillophilia is India’s largest online tours and activities platform. Through its website and app, the company offers a one-stop solution for travelers looking for tours, activities and things to do. Users can choose from more than 10,000 activities in 200+ cities in India and 15 countries in Asia. Headquartered in Bangalore, India, the company was founded in 2011 and employs more than 50 people.

Embedding and managing images and other media content in a mobile application is always challenging. The processes of downloading a media file from the web, storing it on the device, and then displaying it to the user are surprisingly and often frustratingly complex from a coding perspective. In addition, you probably want to add code that enables reusing images rather than downloading it every time, but you have to be smart about it to avoid clogging the precious storage space on your customer's device. Furthermore, your design probably requires that images be displayed in different sizes and DPRs in different devices, but creating and maintaining multiple versions of every image manually is virtually impossible.

Images need to be transformed to optimal formats, resized and cropped for various aspect ratios, especially if you have a responsive site. In addition, you may want to apply special effects and overlays. Videos, too, need to be optimized for web delivery, transcoded to support different resolution options and streamed using adaptive streaming, as well as making other modifications. Then, when your media files are stored on the cloud, you’ll want fast delivery via content deliver networks (CDNs) to ensure a great user experience.

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.