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.

Did you know that five billion users of the top five social apps post 41.6 million messages a minute? Or that three billion JPEG images are created every day?
Not only does this tremendous volume of peer-to-peer activity profoundly affect our social lives, it has also revolutionized the way shoppers navigate the purchase journey. How? By reading unbranded feedback and the like from other users, shoppers can avoid marketing hype and make purchase decisions based on what they often consider to be objective, honest opinions on the merchandise.

Part 1 of this series highlights the basics of user-generated content (UGC) and its benefits for e-commerce. Part 2 describes how to leverage UGC images in e-commerce and efficiently upload, transform, and deliver them with Cloudinary. Part 3 focuses on videos in UGC and the many related management capabilities offered by Cloudinary.

During this months-long COVID-19 pandemic, which of us have not made purchases online? In particular, early on during the lockdown, when only essential businesses were open, the web was the primary shopping outlet. Accordingly, we as consumers have come to learn how varied retailers and brands are in e-commerce savvy.

Currently, Cloudinary boasts a customer base of 7,000, with 800,000 users managing visual media on our AI platform. A remarkable trend indicator is that, between April and June, the overall video platform’s bandwidth grew by more than 140 percent. Many brands, such as Bleacher Report, Mediavine, Nintendo, Fiverr, Guess, Hinge, Finalsite, Outbrain, Salsify, and Taboola, are interacting with their audiences in a more in-depth and authentic manner through video. Of significant help is AI, which greatly simplifies cross-channel, resource-intensive workflows and collaboration in real time.

In today’s digital world, engaging online content is key for catching audience attention. At ImageCon 2020, Cloudinary’s annual conference, Yaron Reichert and me, Jackie Rosenzveig, hosted a session titled ’Handling Media at Scale Using Automation and AI’, which delved into the following:

Think about the last time you bought something online—and about the last time you did that but what you purchased wasn’t something you were after when you opened your browser. What captured your attention in the search results, the assortment page, or the product page that convinced you to make the purchase?

However, along with the benefits of user-generated content (UGC), comes myriad technical challenges. Content must be moderated to avoid compromising your brand. You need to provide a user-friendly process to efficiently manage content uploads. You need to transform images and videos to ensure brand consistency and web performance. You also need to ensure they look presentable across all devices and browser environments. To help brands address these issues and more, we recently ran a three-part blog series on UGC.

With JavaScript (JS), you can create cool image animations, which are difficult to do with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article describes how to—
Here are the topics:
To rotate images with JS, edit the CSS transform
property. See the procedure below.

In December 2019, Cloudinary launched its customer education platform, the Cloudinary Academy, replete with courses taught by the company’s experts on developer-oriented products and digital asset management (DAM) solution. The courses comprise interactive lessons and hands-on assignments, a proven way of familiarizing the audience with the course material and illustrating it with live examples.