At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals. Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for all your image and video needs, including upload, storage, administration, manipulation, optimization and dynamic delivery.
Developing applications for mobile consumption requires facing, and overcoming, some difficult challenges. Apps need to limit their RAM, CPU and battery usage while still performing the required tasks in a reasonable time frame. If too many background tasks are running, the mobile device can become sluggish, with the battery running out very quickly. Coordination with other apps is crucial to keep the device responsive and make the battery last longer.
Developers are constantly faced with challenges of building complex products every single day. And there are constraints on the time needed to build out the features of these products.
Engineering and Product managers want to beat deadlines for projects daily. CEOs want to roll out new products as fast as possible. Entrepreneurs need their MVPs like yesterday. With this in mind, what should developers do?
Images and video are a core component of websites, mobile apps and our digital life. They deliver exciting content and improve the user experience by delivering the best format, size and quality to meet each web visitor’s unique needs
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.
Handling user uploaded images and other files on your website can be a time consuming task. As images grow larger, uploading and processing them becomes more and more complex. For example, common upload issues for images and other files may relate to browser limitations, server configuration issues, memory and timeout issues. Specifically, handling user uploaded images on your website can be a hassle. In this post, we'll show how Cloudinary's cloud-based image management service can help you turn user uploading into a lightweight operation that bypasses your servers altogether.
UPDATE - Since this post was published, we have added a more advanced solution that allows delivering private and authenticated images to your users. See the documentation on Media access control for more details.
Different web applications have very different requirements when images are involved. A dating website will focus its image-related attention on normalizing and delivering his user uploaded snapshots. A pinterest style service is focused on retrieving external images from around the web and fitting them to its cool layout. An eCommerce website is focused on the effective delivery of the many product thumbnails it depicts.
Where do you host all of your website's assets - still on your own web servers?
In modern websites, images alone contribute to more than 50% of a website’s load time, and recent studies show that even a 1 second delay in a page's load speed can result in more than 5% loss in conversion. The impact of correctly delivering your website's images to your viewers is staggering. Luckily, Cloudinary offers a simple way to upload your website's images to the cloud, automatically transform them according to your needs and deliver them optimized through a fast CDN employing industry best practices.