Cloudinary Blog

No programmer could imagine a world without variables. Neither can Cloudinary. That’s why Cloudinary now offers image transformations that support user-defined variables.

Using Cloudinary, you can already deliver transformed images with a variety of transformations, including resizing, cropping, rotating, a huge toolbox of special effects and filters, text and image overlays, and more, all of which you can deliver responsively, on-the-fly, and optimized for quick delivery via CDN.

Controlling who can access your images and videos, and when, can be an important concern for your business and security workflow. You may have resources that you only want some of your users or employees to access, or you may need to make sure that your original resources are secure, and only transformed (edited) versions of your resources are delivered, e.g., with a watermark or logo displayed.

With the decreasing price-performance ratio of computing, research efforts in face detection and face recognition algorithms are rapidly expanding and new techniques for both of these are achieving greater accuracy and reduced processing time.

Images – if you’re a developer, there’s no doubt that at one time or another, you’ve probably worked with a lot of image files, and may have been tasked with ensuring a top-notch user experience or continually improving website and app performance. You may have posed questions on online message boards, or sought advice from your developer colleagues. But there hasn’t been a conference that solely focused on image management…until now.

Every picture has a story to tell. But the story it tells can change when you change the color tone, saturation, contrast, or other elements of a photo.

A few years ago, post-processing a digital image generally required a high level of skill and expensive software such as PhotoShop. But in recent years, popular photo sharing apps such as Instagram, Flickr, and Snapchat started offering built-in filters. Professionals take advantage of filters to make subtle corrections or adjustments. Casual users often apply more prominent filters that add their own unique touch or just make their images more fun.

And so the song goes, well, more or less.

There really are an abundance of content delivery networks (CDNs) out there; and a time and a place in which each of those CDN services could win the race for fastest, most reliable, or best fit for for your resources. But somehow, you have to choose one, right?

One of the main optimization challenges for website and mobile developers is how to display sufficiently high quality images to their visitors while minimizing the image file size. A smaller image file size can lead to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and an improved user experience. The problem is that reducing the file size too much may lead to a lower image quality and could harm visitor satisfaction. Delivering an optimized image with just the right balance between size and quality can be quite tricky.

Even though websites have changed dramatically over the years – from simple text-based pages to advanced in-browser apps full of images and videos – the underlying HTTP protocol really hasn’t changed - until recently, with the approval of the HTTP/2 protocol by the IETF. Today Cloudinary is proud to announce, as part of a CDN infrastructure upgrade, general availability of HTTP/2 support in our image and video management solution. This will help you optimize the user experience on your app or website even more.