As the end of 2015 approaches, we wanted to share a quick summary of Cloudinary’s accomplishment this year and some of our plans for next year. We couldn't possibly do this without including an image manipulation example! That's our hat trick in the title :-)
2015 was a great year for Cloudinary. We more than doubled our numbers, including our team size, offices, customers and revenues. During 2015 we’ve hit another significant milestone, crossing the eight-figures in annual run rate.
This is a guest post by Eric Portis – a proud member of (and newsletter-writer for) the Responsive Issues Community Group. The RICG formulated, championed, and standardized the new HTML features presented in the article.
It can be quite a challenge to graphically design a website or mobile application that displays images in very precise shapes and orientations. This can take the form of warping 2D pictures to have a 3D perspective, placing images in precise shapes or overlaying images in specific locations within another image, for example: overlaying an image over the screen of a smartphone.
Content Optimization and Personalization programs can deliver tremendous ROI to an organization but tend to be very resource intensive, requiring developers to build the code for alternate experiences and creative folks to generate the content. Many of the content optimization/personalization tools out there today (Maxymiser, Optimizely, Adobe Target, Ensighten etc.) have created WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors to help relieve the code/development bottleneck but the creative bottleneck stubbornly remains.
(Guest post by Grant Kemp)
Over the past few months Inviqa have been working to build an official plugin to simplify the process of adding Cloudinary to the 100,000s of Magento sites around the world. Inviqa is one of Magento’s largest partners in Europe and has been working with customers to integrate Cloudinary and ensure that the plugin can cater to a Magento store’s needs.
A fresh new lossless image format has recently been introduced. It is called FLIF, which is an acronym for Free Lossless Image Format. According to the creators of FLIF, it is supposed to significantly outperform the other image formats that have lossless modes, such as PNG, WebP and the new BPG format.
If you have an application that allows users to upload their own photos, it can be very useful to be able to organize these photos according to their content. This will allow you to categorize the content for displaying to all your users and make your image library searchable. Furthermore, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload and find different trends of what people care about. Other added benefits can also include the ability to display matching content to your users according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
Last week Cloudinary attended, and exhibited at, its first ever Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent. The event was packed with a multitude of companies, promoting their products and enticing passers by into their booths with cool t-shirts mini robots and even freshly baked cookies. With a full team manning the booth, we perfected our pitch and attracted a steady stream of visitors. Even some of Cloudinary’s favorite customers stopped by to say hello! Redbull, Stylight and Accenture to name a few.
Back in 2013, Cloudinary published a blog post entitled "Top 10 Mistakes in Handling Website Images". Though these top 10 mistakes still hold true, we've come up with a few additional points that we thought you'd find of interest.
Many social networks, websites and messaging applications allow users to upload a wide variety of media files, and although the majority of files are in the form of images and video clips, a significant minority are audio files. When the website or application subsequently needs to display a thumbnail that describes the uploaded content, images can be cropped and resized down to scale, and a single frame from a video clip can be converted to an image and then also cropped and resized down to scale.
As a website/app developer or owner, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of glitches and mishaps when it comes to users or site visitors sharing your content. Many outlets such as news and media sites, social networks, or e-commerce sites include the option to "like" or "share" content such as blog posts or images. Once shared, the social network site displays a snippet of the shared content alongside a featured image. This way, your site content gets maximum exposure in social networks and attracts additional visitors.
The Internet was abuzz last week after the announcement of Google’s new logo. What caught our eyes more than the artistic changes was this sentence on Google's blog: "building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes". Sounds exciting! But is it correct?
Videos are becoming more prolific with people having the capability to capture videos with a wide variety of cameras, including smartphone cameras that are available almost everywhere. Web and mobile applications that display videos online can be faced with a challenge when the videos are created or uploaded from different devices and in various formats, and then need to be delivered in a multitude of resolutions and aspect ratios to various web browsers, laptops and all kinds of mobile devices in HTML5 web friendly video formats.
Animated GIFs keep getting more and more popular, but they are generally very big files with slow loading times and high bandwidth costs, while the format itself is quite old and not optimized for modern video clips. As developers, you need to allow users to upload their animated GIF files, but you also need to deliver them optimized, which can be a complex, time consuming process.
Last month I was invited to speak at Daho.am, Munich's developers conference. This conference was organized by Stylight, a very successful fashion technology startup. Stylight signed up for a free Cloudinary account about 3 years ago and similarly to Cloudinary back then, Stylight were quite a young startup. Since then both companies have grown impressively together and Stylight are now a premium customer of Cloudinary, managing hundreds of millions of images.
Various factors can have an effect on the visual quality of photos captured by a wide variety of digital cameras. Technical limitations of cameras, coupled with changing conditions in which users take photos, results in a wide range of visual quality. Camera-related limitations arise from a combination of poor optics, noisy sensors, and the modest capabilities of mobile camera phones that are used to take photos in conditions that range from bright daylight to indoor scenes with incandescent light or even dark night scenes.
Responsive web design is a method of designing websites to provide an optimal viewing experience to users, irrespective of the device, window size, orientation, or resolution used to view the website. A site designed responsively adapts its layout to the viewing environment, resizing and moving elements dynamically and based on the properties of the browser or device the site is being displayed on.
When was the last time you've asked Google about your favorite band, movie star, or personal hobby? I can only assume that one of the first results that came up was from Answers.com. Nearly everyone knows this website, which is on the Quantcast Top 10 most visited sites in the world.
Many websites now offer their users the ability to upload images and profile pictures, making it a challenge for web designers to maintain a certain graphic design and style when subsequently displaying these images. The profile pictures may need to be smartly cropped to focus on the faces, with some sites that prefer close-ups of faces and others that prefer including more background when displaying images of people.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. For modern websites, a video surely takes the visual impact to a whole new level.
Nowadays, people enjoy the amazing capability of shooting videos with smartphone cameras that easily fit in their back pockets and are accessible nearly everywhere. Modern web applications have an opportunity to dramatically increase their visual impact by showcasing these videos online. Between news reports, user shared video snippets, explainer videos and ad campaigns, we see more and more videos appearing daily in our visited websites.
Rails is a great web development framework that was recently considered the coolest framework around. While other frameworks have gained popularity over time, Rails remains one of the most popular web development frameworks to date..
Red eye often happens due to the use of flash in low light conditions as the light hits the eye very quickly and into the retina. It then bounces off of the back of the eye and emits a red color due to the blood vessels there. Although more professional modern cameras and flashes generally prevent this from happening, red eye may still occur with simpler, smaller cameras (including smartphones). There are various software solutions for red eye removal available on mobile devices and desktops, some of which require manual processing to get good results.
Social networking sites allow users to upload images or other types of files that are immediately available to other users via news feeds or notifications. In some cases, attackers can directly spread infected files, but more commonly, they leverage the viral effect and the fact that users are simply unaware that their files are infected through sharing and collaborating with others. As a site owner or application developer, it is your responsibility to protect users and prevent these situations from occurring. Fortunately, Cloudinary makes this easier with its Metascan add-on.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on: Advanced Facial Attributes Detection
It is common for e-commerce, media, and news sites to remove image backgrounds or make them transparent in order to place the main element of the image on either white or color backgrounds. The final result better integrates an image into a site or specific page’s graphic design. For example, a fashion site that presents clothes or shoes should have the main element of a photo (e.g. shoes) extracted from the original image background, then edited to fit the site’s catalogue design and structure.
Front end developers may want to combine multiple images into a single image. For example, when creating and adding watermarks to stock photos, adding shapes or badges, preparing content for print (e.g. placing a logo on a t-shirt or a mug), adding a caption, and so on.
Image URLs tend to appear as a long list of random characters that are not intended for viewers and are not very useful to search engines. Concise and meaningful image file names are better for search engines to extract information about an image, therefore supporting your site's SEO ranking.
Photos today can be easily edited by means of resizing, cropping, adjusting the contrast, or changing an image’s format. As a result, new images are created that are similar to the original ones. Websites, web applications and mobile apps that allow user generated content uploads can benefit from identifying similar images.
Cloudinary offers you a comprehensive online interface that allows you to arrange and manage your image assets. With Cloudinary’s Media Library, you can easily view, upload, moderate, and search through your images. We recently enhanced this web interface with a new feature that allows you to instantly view semantic image data (descriptive image metadata), that is automatically extracted from your images.
Here at Cloudinary, we always strive to develop the best possible product, answer as many of our customers' needs and offer a superb support. Since launching 3 years ago we worked tirelessly to build the technology that empowers the Cloudinary product and supports our customers. While doing so, we haven’t really given a lot of love to our website design.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on by Imagga. See Automatic image categorization and tagging with Imagga
