If you have an application that allows users to upload their own photos, it can be very useful to be able to organize these photos according to their content. This will allow you to categorize the content for displaying to all your users and make your image library searchable. Furthermore, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload and find different trends of what people care about. Other added benefits can also include the ability to display matching content to your users according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
Last week Cloudinary attended, and exhibited at, its first ever Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent. The event was packed with a multitude of companies, promoting their products and enticing passers by into their booths with cool t-shirts mini robots and even freshly baked cookies. With a full team manning the booth, we perfected our pitch and attracted a steady stream of visitors. Even some of Cloudinary’s favorite customers stopped by to say hello! Redbull, Stylight and Accenture to name a few.
Back in 2013, Cloudinary published a blog post entitled "Top 10 Mistakes in Handling Website Images". Though these top 10 mistakes still hold true, we've come up with a few additional points that we thought you'd find of interest.
Many social networks, websites and messaging applications allow users to upload a wide variety of media files, and although the majority of files are in the form of images and video clips, a significant minority are audio files. When the website or application subsequently needs to display a thumbnail that describes the uploaded content, images can be cropped and resized down to scale, and a single frame from a video clip can be converted to an image and then also cropped and resized down to scale.
As a website/app developer or owner, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of glitches and mishaps when it comes to users or site visitors sharing your content. Many outlets such as news and media sites, social networks, or e-commerce sites include the option to "like" or "share" content such as blog posts or images. Once shared, the social network site displays a snippet of the shared content alongside a featured image. This way, your site content gets maximum exposure in social networks and attracts additional visitors.
The Internet was abuzz last week after the announcement of Google’s new logo. What caught our eyes more than the artistic changes was this sentence on Google's blog: "building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes". Sounds exciting! But is it correct?
Videos are becoming more prolific with people having the capability to capture videos with a wide variety of cameras, including smartphone cameras that are available almost everywhere. Web and mobile applications that display videos online can be faced with a challenge when the videos are created or uploaded from different devices and in various formats, and then need to be delivered in a multitude of resolutions and aspect ratios to various web browsers, laptops and all kinds of mobile devices in HTML5 web friendly video formats.
Cloudinary helps Baby’s Firsts App deliver images quickly and preserve consistency from app to print. Baby’s Firsts is a free iPhone app that helps parents collect photos, instantly share photos via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and produce photo albums of their baby’s first year. Using more than 300 creative, developmentally timed reminders to capture key moments and milestones, the easy-to-navigate app enables parents to store photos in the cloud and create customized photo pages that are then transformed into heirloom-quality, printed baby books.
Animated GIFs keep getting more and more popular, but they are generally very big files with slow loading times and high bandwidth costs, while the format itself is quite old and not optimized for modern video clips. As developers, you need to allow users to upload their animated GIF files, but you also need to deliver them optimized, which can be a complex, time consuming process.
Last month I was invited to speak at Daho.am, Munich's developers conference. This conference was organized by Stylight, a very successful fashion technology startup. Stylight signed up for a free Cloudinary account about 3 years ago and similarly to Cloudinary back then, Stylight were quite a young startup. Since then both companies have grown impressively together and Stylight are now a premium customer of Cloudinary, managing hundreds of millions of images.