Videos in web sites and apps are starting to catch up with images in terms of popularity and they are a constantly growing part of the media strategy for most organizations. This means bigger challenges for developers who need to handle these videos in their web sites and mobile apps. Cloudinary's mission is to solve all developer needs around image and video content management. In this blog post, we are excited to introduce Cloudinary's complete cloud-based video content management solution for developers.
At Novactive, we are always excited to use new technologies and/or to improve our favorite technologies with other ones when it makes sense for us, for our clients and for the community.
Our business is web technologies, and the most professional content management system (CMS) for us is eZ Platform (previously eZ Publish). That's why we love creating connectors to this CMS. Our most recent eZ project is an image management plugin using Cloudinary.
Knowledge is power. And if you allow your users to upload images, you also probably want to better understand what their images contain. Whether a photo is of a building, people, animals, celebrities, or a product, image processing and analysis can assist in further comprehension. The benefits of this knowledge can go beyond "merely" categorizing your content and making your image library searchable: drawing insights from user generated content can be very useful! What better way to learn more about your users than to analyze the images they upload and find out what they care about and then have the ability to display relevant content to them according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
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.
Image optimization is a mandatory step for delivering images with the smallest possible file size while maintaining visual quality. That way, you save bytes and improve your website performance because the smaller the image files, the faster the browser can download and render them on your viewers’ screens.
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 upload PHP files fast.
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.
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.