Cloudinary is passionate about its users. We built our cloud-based image management features around real-world pain points, and it's gratifying to see our customers use those features to solve major business challenges.
How do you crop an image to a custom shape? How do you add a shadow effect to an image with transparency? How do you add text overlay to an image without using HTML?
If you build or maintain a website with a lot of images, you've probably had many questions like these. Most developers who work with images have scripts or tools that can achieve dozens if not hundreds of image manipulations - from basics like crop and resize, to advanced stuff like shadow and transparency, watermarks, face detection, etc. But how do you mix and match these manipulations correctly to solve a problem or achieve a certain effect?
Fashion isn't something you'd expect to repeat itself in the technology world - technology advances quickly and hardly ever circles back. But where animated GIFs are involved, it seems like the 90s are here again. Animated GIFs are everywhere, and not only on strange, cheezy web sites - they've become mainstream. You now see short videos shared and played as animated GIFs in reputed sites such as Gawker and TechCrunch.
There are many options to consider when allowing a user to upload an image to your website or mobile app. You might wish to limit the size and format of the uploaded images. You may want to apply specific manipulations to the images, such as cropping, resizing and adapting the image to your site's look & feel. Beyond that, it's common to create a variety of thumbnails from a newly uploaded image.
Image optimization is an important step to reducing page load times, improving user experience and reducing bandwidth costs. When using the JPEG image format, which is best used for photos, the most common optimization is controlling the JPEG quality level.
Our customers frequently ask us if we can help them apply dynamic text overlays over images. While a common approach is to add text elements in your pages using HTML elements, CSS or native mobile UI controls, in many cases it's preferable to create images with text layers already included. It makes it simpler to display rich content on different media channels and devices, while ensuring a pixel-perfect result as your graphic designer envisioned.
Many websites and mobile apps today allow their visitors to share their own photos. Users upload their profile images to dating sites, photos of their personal belongings to second hand market websites and real estate billboards. Users share their personal photos on social networks, and upload images to their favorite e-commerce websites, showcasing and reviewing their latest purchases.
Cloudinary's Management Console provides valuable information about your images, powerful image browsing capabilities, reports, and various account customization options.
Today we want to introduce the new version of our console, including a completely new full-width responsive layout, important metrics and insights about your usage of the Cloudinary account, an improved Media Library user interface allowing you to browse through and interactively manipulate and manage your images, and more!
It’s a common challenge in many mobile and web applications: how do you allow users to upload their own images, while automatically adapting these images to a fixed graphic design?
A classic example is a user uploading a profile picture, but instead of providing a headshot (which is what we really need from them), they upload a picture of their entire body with additional objects in the background. Obviously this image will need to be cropped to the size of the profile picture, while focusing on the user’s face.
It’s been a few months and Cloudinary has been growing in leaps and bounds. Check out a few startups who use Cloudinary’s cloud-based image management platform to cut development costs and boost performance of image-heavy pages, in our latest round of "10 startup companies that manage their images in the cloud" (our previous posts: Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3).