Cloudinary Blog

Part 1 of this series delves into the background for this guide. Here in part 2 are the ins and outs.

Wait, hear me out. I know, we just talked about this: Nobody is sheepishly pleading you, “Please, might we have just one more image on the page?” No, I’m not telling you to pick that particular fight. Instead, use a little smoke and mirrors to avoid requests for images that your audience needn’t render right away and might never need at all while loading them asynchronously—only as needed.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the rules of putting images on the web.

For such a flexible medium as the web, software development can feel like a painstaking, rules-oriented game—an errant comma might break a build, a missing semicolon might wipe out an entire page. For a long time, the laws of image rendering seemed similarly cut-and-dry: For example, if your markups contained an img element , the singular content of its src attribute would be foisted on the audience regardless of their browsing context, period.

Consumers today expect media-rich experiences. No longer a novelty, it’s second nature to swipe through multiple photos on mobile apps, zoom in on product images for a closer look, visualize online travel reviews, socialize cool video clips while browsing, and encounter brand messages when walking into brick-and-mortar stores. These experiences weave together visual cues and clues with relevant content to create meaning and more authentic connections for customers.

Recently we added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. This app demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart. At the time, we published Introducing the Cloudinary Demo Android App, Part 1, which provided an under-the-hood tour of how the eCommerce Android App was designed and how Cloudinary was integrated throughout.

Everyone wants a great website. Few know what it takes.

Building engaging websites and apps are often primary goals for developers and marketers. The key to increasing your site’s performance is making your content relevant and engaging, and your website fast and fun to use.

When you visit a website—whether from your laptop, phone, or tablet—you expect the pages to load fast and all the images to look great. However, ensuring that websites live up to visitor expectations can be more complicated than it might seem.

Last month we unveiled a refresh of our website. As with all redesigns, there were numerous drivers behind the rollout. First and foremost, we’re a company that understands the power of visual storytelling, and the ways in which a website must beautifully and clearly convey a brand’s story and offerings. Our website needed to better reflect our brand and our solutions. This post highlights some of the thinking behind our changes.

If you are an avid YouTube viewer or a Netflix binger, you might have noticed some fascinating changes in their latest preview thumbnails. They sure are attention grabbing, aren’t they?

Video previews are becoming more and more popular, not the least because they entice viewers, attract clickthroughs and, more often than not, gain a happy and loyal audience. Problem is, the task sounds like an art in itself. Just how can you go about creating appealing video previews without having to rely on movie professionals? Have you ever wished that you could quickly create video previews like those on YouTube and Netflix, but still rest assured that they'll include the good stuff?

One main reason people use Cloudinary is to leverage its capabilities for transforming digital assets, such as images and videos. Whether for optimization or aesthetics, it’s easy and fast to manipulate digital media for your web or mobile projects.

Part 1 of this series introduces the Free Lossy Image Format (FUIF), which I recently developed. Part 2 explains the why, what, and how of FUIF. This post, part 3 of the series, delves into how FUIF is legacy friendly, which I alluded to in Part 2.