If you heard of Cloudinary before, you probably already know how useful Cloudinary is with managing all your dynamically uploaded images, transforming these to their required dimensions and delivering them through a fast CDN.
OpinionStage is a wonderful service. It allows everybody a better, more engaging way to express and debate their views. OpinionStage is also one of Cloudinary's early adopters. Over time, our friends at OpinionStage helped us improve Cloudinary with many constructive suggestions.
As web developers, we closely monitor the shifts in today's modern web applications architecture stack. We find the client vs. server-side HTML rendering debate particularly interesting.
In the past several years, we’ve witnessed the enormous rise in popularity of client-side JS/CoffeeScript MVC & MVVM solutions. From popular libraries such as Backbone.js that strive to add basic structure to client-side apps, all the way to feature-rich libraries that manage your entire client-side stack, with data-binding, client-server model sync, dependency tracking, templates and more. The involvement of high-profile companies and individuals in this market is also fascinating, between KnockoutJS contributions from Microsoft, the Google-backed Angular and Yehuda Katz's Ember, the heat is definitely on.
When we conceived Cloudinary, our vision was to help websites manage all their assets (images, Javascripts, CSS, etc.) in the cloud, easily and effectively. Our initial focus was on image management in the cloud since we've felt that this particular area was significantly underdeveloped. We figured that every web developer would be happy with a solid solution for image uploads, applying image transformations in the Cloud and getting their website's images delivered through a fast CDN.
Most leading blogs deliver their assets (images, JS, CSS, etc.) through state-of-the-art CDNs and utilize online resizing technologies. With faster, off-site access, they greatly improve their users’ browsing experience, while reducing load on their servers.
Cloudinary provides many built-in image resizing and cropping options: filling or fitting to required dimensions, scaling image up or down, cropping to a thumbnail, and so forth. When cropping you'll need to specify an anchor, or gravity. The image crop can be anchored to the image's center, top, left, etc. The cropping can even be relative to faces detected in the image.
Twitter and Facebook. One adds rounded corners to their user’s profile pictures. The other doesn’t. Can you recall which service is the one adding rounded corners?
At the moment, the right answer is Twitter, though if you guessed Facebook you weren’t far off. Both services have on-and-off relations with rounded cornered images, and Facebook tried different designs before backing out of rounded corners for the time being.
When we set to develop Cloudinary’s Rails integration Gem, it was obvious to us that we’ll base it on CarrierWave. Here’s why.
Photos are a major part of your website. Your eCommerce solution will have multiple snapshots uploaded for each product. Your users might want to upload their photo to be used as their personal profile photo. What’s entailed when developing such a photo management pipeline, end-to-end?
Cloudinary’s roots go back to when we needed to embed users’ uploaded images and profile pictures for web projects we’ve developed.
We had to show people and faces of users in various dimensions and perspectives, and the process proved cumbersome.
Hi everyone, and welcome to Cloudinary!
We have a long history of developing web-based products. In fact, our main line of business is helping early stage web-based startups code their web applications.