Cloudinary Blog

One of the hardest optimization goals when showing images to your website (and mobile application's) visitors, is to minimize the image file size while maintaining high enough display quality.

 

Smaller image file sizes directly translate to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and improved user browsing experience. But small file sizes directly translate to lower image quality and may harm visitor satisfaction. Maintaining just the right balance is both crucial and hard.

As tradition goes, we are happy to present Cloudinary's "10 Startup companies that manage their images in the cloud" - Part 3. (previous parts: Part 1, Part 2). 

 

As Cloudinary continues to grow, so do the features and capabilities we offer. This allows for usage methods that are even more creative and sophisticated than before. We wanted to showcase 10 great startup companies that each in its own wonderful, unique manner, use Cloudinary to manage their images.

Online advertising is one of the most popular tools to drive traffic to your website and mobile application in a consistent and cost-effective manner. Online text ads play a very big role in this strategy. 

 

Many modern web and mobile applications include integral social aspects as parts of their online solution. 

 

Users can sign-in to these services and be identified by their chosen social identity. This is made quite straightforward by leveraging single sign-on services such as Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google+ and others. After signing in, activities in the service and user generated content can be accompanied with the real name of the users as well as their profile pictures.

Modern image compression techniques have had a large impact on our lifestyle. Digital cameras can save thousands of high-quality photos on a single memory card, smartphones can quickly share high resolution images on-the-fly, and websites and mobile apps can show rich media quickly. All of this just couldn,t have worked if image data was stored at its original, raw form. 

Two decades ago websites had such a simple usage flow. Web servers returned complete HTML pages and each user action required that a new HTML page be reloaded from the server. Later on Ajax joined the game allowing dynamic updating of specific web page fragments via simple Javascript requests to the server. Google's wide-spread use of Ajax with Gmail was simply mind blowing at the time. Today's product requirements wouldn't settle even for that.

Do you like to show your photos exactly as they were taken or do you usually tweak them a little to get that extra punch? What about applying artistic filters before sharing them with your friends and family? 

 

Fashion outlets have evolved dramatically in the last decade. In the past, if you wanted to be on top of the latest fashion trends, you had to subscribe to all the latest magazines and every month wait for the mailman to drop them off. If you wanted to remember a certain outfit or designer, you could either dog ear the page ('bookmark') or cut out the model or design and literally pin it to your cork board.

Web applications and web APIs are usually programmed to perform requests in a synchronous manner. A common web-based access flow will start with a requester accessing a remote service. The remote service in turn will process the request and quickly return the result. 

 

 

We are often asked to share our customer stories with the rest of the Cloudinary community. Whether it's for learning about others experiences managing images with Cloudinary, or just to reaffirm Cloudinary's solution - we love to hear your stories and we're happy to share them.

 

Cloudinary's image management service is used by thousands of world-wide websites and mobile apps. For many of our clients, Cloudinary has become a central, mission-critical component used for managing image uploads, transformations and delivery.

 

Call us prejudice, but as a hardcore Linux guys, the name Microsoft always caused us to flinch a little. That was our initial reaction when we were approached by the Azure team. We have been integrating Cloudinary with many PaaS providers to make our platform as accessible as possible, and Azure actually made perfect sense. Still, we were a bit hesitant at first as we never considered Microsoft a leading player in the world of rapid web & mobile development. 

As Cloudinary continues to grow, the number of companies using Cloudinary to manage their images grows with us. Each company has its own unique product and utilizes Cloudinary in a different, fascinating way. In this post, we wanted to introduce you to several cool startup companies, and with them, the many different ways that Cloudinary’s services can be used. 

Images. Your web (or mobile) application is probably filled to the brim with images. You might be surprised at just how much impact these images have on your visitors. From their graphical appeal to their size and access times - these images determine your visitors browsing experience and ultimately their conversion to repeating visitors and paying clients.

Can your users upload their own images to your web or mobile application? What about your content partners - do they upload their images directly to your service? 

 

We frequently hear complaints that as the service owner, you don't get enough visibility into the images uploaded to your service. In this blog post, we wanted to help you change that.

Since its inception, one of Cloudinary's main pillars was to always be there for our customers. Every question you ever asked us helped us better understand what image solutions are most important to you. Every support request helped us find and fix gaps in our product and our documentation. Nearly every feature request we got was immediately given top priority and helped us shape Cloudinary into the service it is today. Without a doubt, we owe much of Cloudinary's success today to the amount of open communication we have going with our community.

Images are a major part of any modern website. Images nowadays account to more than 60% of a website's total bandwidth. This is even more pronounced when dealing with cutting-edge web design. On an image rich social website employing a Pinterest-like layout, this number can reach upward of 85% (!).

More and more developers are getting to know the power of the cloud. In today's web application development world you can leverage the cloud to build large scale applications so quickly and easily that it's simply mind-boggling that you get all of this while still keeping on a very reasonable budget. 

Modifying an image opacity so the image is semi-transparent is a common requirement when implementing modern graphics design. Reducing image opacity allows background images to feel less dominant. Reducing opacity also allows layering of multiple images one on top of the other, an important step when adding watermarks, badges and textual overlays to images.