PetRescue’s Journey to Save Animals’ Lives With Cloudinary

ABOUT

Pet Rescue

The most visited animal welfare site in Australia, PetRescue, has placed thousands of animals into new “forever homes” since its founding in 2004. To date, the nonprofit has hosted more than 800,000 listings, helped no less than 661,000 pets find new homes and raised over AUS$10m in food and product donations. Nearly six million pet lovers and potential adopters have visited PetRescue.com.au.

Key to its success is the new-found ease with which members can upload pictures of potential new animal companions to share with the community. Cloudinary’s powerful image and video management solutions have been at the center of this vital functionality, making it easier to find new household pets.

Before PetRescue there was no easy way for families to find new pets in the often unfriendly Australian local animal welfare system. PetRescue’s three original founders, including its Co-founder and Joint CEO John Bishop (“JB”), decided to improve the situation by offering a unified, online, and central platform to replace the neighborhood flier.

THE CHALLENGE

Improve Back-End Handling of Millions of User Generated Images

“Offering free programs and services to help millions of Australians discover the joy of adopting a new family member, as well as help more than a thousand Antipodean rescue organizations, shelters, and pounds save the lives of thousands of pets is not a simple job,” says CEO John Bishop.

PetRescue helps its partner organizations, which want to showcase pets for adoption, and the pet-searching public for potential new family members.

The scale of PetRescue’s ever-growing image library means that robust and scalable technology has always been a must. In 2020 alone, more than 300,000 enquiries from potential adopters have hit the website. Staying current with web functionality and image management has been challenging, as JB explains:

“For over 16 years the website’s been through a number of iterations and was completely torn down and rebuilt in 2011 to ’12,” he states. “But even after all those enhancements, the process of uploading images was difficult for the end user. “

JB explains that when a user created a listing, their animal photos had to be uploaded to a front-end server then to an Amazon AWS S3 bucket, queued, manipulated then sent back to S3 and the image updated. “There were also break points, plus we had to set a 15-minute time delay to allow for all the back-end processes to complete. When we had 10,000 images in the queue waiting, though, that could easily turn into more like half an hour, and we also couldn’t offer users any cropping or resizing functionality.”

JB adds, “When it came to resizing images, we had to manually code to process millions of images as background jobs, which just added to the complexity. Pre-cloud storage was also a huge problem.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

From Complexity to Something That… ‘Just Works’

“I don’t need to tell you guys how good the system is,” JB enthuses. “The fact we can just call different fixed dimensions of an image via the URL and it’s just there is amazing. As is the fact that there are no delays and no background tasks running. It just works.”

Another welcome advantage of working with Cloudinary is the ability to optimize for mobile. For JB, this automation aligns with PetRescue’s philosophy of using best-of-breed tools that free up staff to concentrate on the main mission: helping Australia’s domestic animals not end up prematurely and needlessly euthanized.

THE RESULTS

PetRescue Added Ability to Appeal Through Rich Media

JB also likes working with Cloudinary because it is continually innovating: “Recently, Cloudinary gave us a way to better work with the JPEG 2000 format, which I had never even heard of. This is an important format for Apple Safari users, which represents about 45% of our base. That’s just another example of how Cloudinary is constantly making life easier for us and our users, as well as saving us a bunch of money.”

Summing up the benefits of working with a responsive partner like Cloudinary, JB concluded: “Now, we don’t need to spend any time on writing a top-flight image handling system,” he points out. “You’ve already done it for us.”