The advent of web development since 25 years ago has given birth to an abundance of online services that help developers build apps efficiently and smoothly. Gravatar is a shining example of such a service. Built by WordPress, Gravatar generates globally recognized avatars. Fun fact: 80 percent of Gravatar users first came across that service when reading a WordPress blog.
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.
This article explains the basics of FTP, peer-to-peer (P2P), and web-browser uploads, as well as Cloudinary’s automated upload capabilities that save time and improve workflows.
File uploads are cross-system data transfers. You can upload files in one of three ways:
In this article, you will learn:
Images and videos, called rich media as a whole, abound on the Internet. Many modern developer apps require that you manipulate and upload files to the server—a mundane, time-consuming, and error-prone chore. A saving grace is Cloudinary’s PHP SDK, with which you can easily and speedily upload multiple images and videos in PHP files.
Updates since publication:
- Following Google's shutdown of its legacy Google+ API in March 2019, the Google+ (gplus) option is no longer available.
- Following changes made by Instagram in June 2020, the Instagram (instagram_name) option is no longer available.
Image optimization, which results in the smallest possible file size but no loss in visual quality, is a mandatory step before delivery. That way, you save bytes and improve website performance because the smaller the image files, the faster the browser can download and render them on viewers’ screens.
Nowadays, users can and often upload various media files to social networks, websites, and messaging apps. Most of those media are images and videos, with a significant number being audio files. Subsequently, to create a thumbnail to depict an image, a site or app would crop and then resize it to scale. To depict a video, they would convert, crop, and resize a single frame from it as a thumbnail.
Every image is unique, so are website visitors. In a perfect world, we would adapt images to be "just right" for all users, i.e., perfectly cropped with responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings, and optimal quality in the most suitable format.
See this example of a photo of a cat:
Short videos of animated GIFs are spreading like wildfire around the web, especially in media and news sites, and people frequently share animated GIFs on social apps. However, because those GIFs are not optimized, their sizes are huge, consuming heavy bandwidth and slowing down page loads. Also, resizing and transforming a large number of animated GIFs, one by one, to match the graphic design of your site or app is a lengthy, CPU-intensive process.
Images. More likely than not, your web or mobile app is filled to the brim with images, which, from graphical appeal to size and access times, figure prominently in the browsing experience. Image appeal could motivate visitors to return and, in the case of e-commerce, become customers.
No matter how outstanding the page design is, many of the images that you as web developers must embed are not in your direct control. Not to mention that social websites contain user-uploaded profile photos; the product photos on e-commerce sites are too numerous to be edited one at a time; and media outlets invariably contain many photographs of different standards.
Cloudinary offers an automated tool that tweaks and retouches images by sharpening or blurring them. Obviously, you can also sharpen blurry images with that option.