Cloudinary Blog

As online interactions multiply exponentially, visual media has become the most significant venue for delivering the benefits of what used to be in-person contacts. With this in mind, companies have completely shifted their digital strategies for consumer experiences, taking a media-first approach in how they interact and engage.

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.

“For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.” (Ted Lowe)

We often laugh about snooker (think billiards if you’ve never heard of snooker) commentaries back in the days of black and white television, but for approximately 300 million people worldwide, the seemingly simple task of distinguishing colors is a daily challenge. Color blindness, or Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), affects roughly one in twelve men, and one in two hundred women. That's over 8% of the population - a significant percentage of your potential customers who may be missing vital information or unable to engage fully with your site. Couple that with increasing legislation promoting accessibility and it's easy to see why you should care about color.

User-generated content (UGC), aka user-created content (UCC), is material—images, videos, audio, text—that is posted by online audiences at will, often on social media. Such content frequently and indirectly promotes products and services for the organizations concerned, lending more credibility than conventional advertisements.

Adding code to display an image in your application is one of the most common tasks for almost every application developer. However, when it comes to Android applications, there is no inbuilt support for any image related tasks, which could be a potential pain when Android developers need to handle loading (and reloading) images into the view, handling the caching and memory issues, and supporting simple UI functionality.

ExoPlayer, a media player for Android, was developed and is being maintained by Google as an alternative for Android’s default MediaPlayer. Among ExoPlayer’s advantages over MediaPlayer are dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), smooth streaming, and common encryption. A major advantage, however, is ExoPlayer’s easy customization.

JPEG images are either progressive or nonprogressive, depending on their encoding order, not politics.

Encoding of and decoding of nonprogressive occurs in this simple order: from top to bottom and from left to right. Consequently, when a nonprogressive JPEG is loading on a slow connection, you see the image’s top part first, followed by the other parts as loading progresses.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format developed by Adobe for delivering formatted text and images. A PDF file includes a complete description of all layout elements, including text, fonts, images and layers, ensuring that the file will look identical when opened on any device. The PDF format also has the big advantage of compressing high-quality files to a relatively small file size.