Image optimization involves delivering images with the smallest possible file size while maintaining visual quality. Optimizing images means saving bytes and improving performance for your website. The fewer bytes per image, the faster the browser can download and render the content on your users’ screens.
Web developers build their web platforms using a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Python and Ruby.
There are lots of images and videos all over the internet. A lot of applications these days demand that the user is able to manipulate and upload files to the server. Thankfully, PHP provides the functions to handle file uploads. There are two main ways to handle file uploads with PHP: The barebones way, which includes building an HTML form that allows users to submit files, and then creating a PHP upload script to handle the files; and using Cloudinary’s solution.
One of the main optimization challenges for website and mobile developers is how to display sufficiently high quality images to their visitors while minimizing the image file size. A smaller image file size can lead to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and an improved user experience. The problem is that reducing the file size too much may lead to a lower image quality and could harm visitor satisfaction. Delivering an optimized image with just the right balance between size and quality can be quite tricky.
Once upon a time, in long forgotten browser versions, getting a video into a website required creating and embedding Flash resources. But these days, all modern browsers support HTML5, including the HTML5 <video> tag, which means you’ve got a built-in video player that anyone can use.
I'll start by giving it to you straight:
As part of the recent "auto–everything" launch, we introduced two new transformation parameters – dpr_auto and w_auto, which pair the DPR and Width Client Hints with Cloudinary’s existing image resizing and delivery infrastructure, in order to serve up simple, automatic responsive images.
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.
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:
