In part 1 of this blog series, we covered the power of low-code workflow engines to support image and video management.
This installment focuses on harnessing the power of low-code to accelerate visual media editing: the transformations that turn raw visual content into perfect end user experiences.
We live in a visual world, and today’s consumers expect gorgeous, optimized visual content across every digital experience. At the same time, the pace of innovation in media transformation technologies is accelerating. Brands need to harness these innovations to deliver “wow” visuals at scale.
But building and managing a pipeline for the full range of media transformations can be a daunting task. Manually coding each transformation, whether it’s resizing images for various platforms or creating product variants in different colors, is often time-consuming and error-prone.
Moreover, the pace of innovation means that there are always new tools and services emerging, each offering unique capabilities for specific use cases, such as image beautification.
And in the current economic environment, teams are expected to deliver innovative experiences at massive scale, but are often facing budget constraints and cutbacks. Cost cutting means that efficiency is the order of the day. Simply put, teams need to do more with less.
This is where a low-code workflow engine like Cloudinary’s MediaFlows shines. It simplifies the orchestration of a wide range of transformations, both internal and third-party, saving you time and resources. It empowers your team to stay agile and take advantage of the latest technologies and services, such as Cloudinary’s AI, to enhance and customize your media with ease.
With MediaFlows, you can easily build workflows to automate repetitive, manual tasks involved in getting media production-ready. Benefits include accelerated time to market for new creative, reduced costs by minimizing manual work, improved image quality and consistency, and flexibility to tap into cutting-edge innovations.
In this article, we’ll dive into four key use cases that demonstrate how MediaFlows can accelerate the process of transforming image and video.
E-commerce brands often have extensive product catalogs with multiple SKU variants – for example, a shoe or handbag in multiple colors. In order to properly merchandise their website, they need to show visuals of the product in all colors. However, photographing multiple variants of the same product is costly and time-consuming. Generative AI provides the promise of automating the recoloring process – but it can be hard to do at scale, with hundreds or even thousands of SKUs, each with multiple variants.
- How MediaFlows helps: MediaFlows integrates with Cloudinary AI and other third-party services to automatically recolor product variants, reducing manual post-production work. Its Shopify and Akeneo integrations keep e-commerce systems up-to-date with every SKU variant.
- Why it matters: Speed up product launches, save time and money, and eliminate back-and-forth in e-commerce systems.
Video is rapidly becoming the currency of the visual economy. According to one study, video generates 1,200% more engagement on social media than image and text combined. Repurposing static images into videos (like slideshows or GIFs) is a cost-effective way to capture the benefits of video. Slideshows are a particularly effective format for brands with dynamic inventory like e-commerce, travel, and real estate.
But manually editing and arranging images into slideshows and videos is a time-consuming process. It’s here that MediaFlows can simplify the task, automatically transforming still images into engaging slideshows, videos, GIFs, and animations for every product in your catalog.
- How MediaFlows helps: MediaFlows automates the process, transforming images into captivating slideshows and videos, ensuring that your product detail pages come to life and improving the impact of your email marketing campaigns.
- Why it matters: Create eye-catching video content, populate product detail pages with dynamic videos, and enhance email marketing with personalized GIFs.
The bar for visual content has never been higher, but the process of getting images and video pixel-perfect can be time-consuming. It involves a wide range of asset enhancements (adjusting lighting, color quality, contrast, image correction, etc.) along with brand-standard crops and transformations. Additionally, it may involve the use of specialized software (e.g., for image retouching).
Add into the post-production pipeline the need for approvals from multiple teams, and getting new creative to market can be a lengthy and manual process.
- How MediaFlows helps: MediaFlows taps into Cloudinary’s capabilities, optimizing lighting, color quality, and contrast for pixel-perfect creative. It offers connector frameworks to integrate with your preferred image correction tools and allows for final creative team approval before going live.
- Why it matters: Go from photoshoot to live products seamlessly, use your favorite image correction tools, and provide your creative team with final approval.
Getting visual content ready for use across various platforms (like Facebook, Insta, TikTok, and Pinterest) and formats (desktop and mobile, plus different ad formats) is critical but often challenging. Different ad platforms have different requirements, and manually preparing images for each one is time-consuming and error-prone.
- How MediaFlows helps: MediaFlows ensures your images are perfectly sized for the most important ad platforms and formats. It uses Cloudinary’s content-aware AI to capture the most engaging crops for each image. You can also set up alerts to notify team members when ad images are ready for review or image and text overlay.
- Why it matters: Resize images hassle-free, focus on generating engaging creative, and automate collaboration among team members.
Delivering the perfect visual experience requires tapping into the power of visual media transformation at scale. Low-code development environments like MediaFlows make it easy to build and automate complex transformation pipelines, improving efficiency while accelerating time to market.
Whatever the steps involved in preparing your visual content for production (creating product variants, generating videos from static images, enhancing images, optimizing media for ads, or more), MediaFlows makes it easy to bring your imagination to life.
Learn more about MediaFlows and get started for free today.
