Programmable Media release notes: November 29, 2024

Cloudinary Programmable Media release notes are published periodically and give you a quick overview of all the new features, enhancements, and fixes that have been recently released for Cloudinary developers. When relevant, they may also give sneak previews of upcoming features and/or other important announcements.

New features

Video Player profiles

Video player profiles provide a mechanism to define and save your video player configuration to your Cloudinary account and then reference this profile as part of your video player setup. This allows you to easily make changes via the UI and apply those changes to all instances without having to redeploy your code.

Use the Video Player Studio to create and manage player profiles:

Add the profile to your Video Player configuration:

Learn more about Video Player profiles

Focus area refiner

When cropping images, or placing layers, you may have certain areas of interest in the composition of the picture that you want to focus on. Although there are AI-based ways to focus on areas of an image, sometimes you need to ensure accuracy and consistency, so Cloudinary now provides the capability to define and refine custom areas of an image.

Accessible through the Transformation Builder, the focus area refiner lets you fine tune, or specify new custom focus areas in an image. It supports face coordinates, custom coordinates, and custom regions.

Learn more about the focus area refiner

Optimize by default

For new customers on an account plan that uses the image impressions and/or video duration metric, delivered media is optimized by default.

This means that automatic format selection is applied to all delivered images and/or videos (depending your plan) without having to specify f_auto in the delivery URLs, and images are automatically resized based on the viewer's device. Default quality settings are also applied when either of these settings are enabled.

You can change the default optimization settings in the Console.

Learn more about optimize by default settings

Clipping path gravity

You can now specify a clipping path within a TIFF file as the gravity to focus on when cropping images. Use the URL syntax g_clipping_path_!<clipping path name>!, for example:

Learn more about clipping path gravity

Enhancements

Generative fill improvements

The latest, more advanced version of our generative fill AI model produces cleaner, more reliable, and cohesive image expansions. It boasts significant quality enhancements, including sharper, detailed results with fewer distractions. These improvements are automatically applied to all generative fill transformations that are generated from now on, with no changes to the syntax.

See the difference between results produced by the old generative fill model and the new one:

Old generative fill New generative fill

Learn more about generative fill

User-generated content guide

We've added a user-generated content guide to the docs, which highlights the Cloudinary features that you can use for UGC use cases. Four popular use cases are discussed, with a deep dive and sample app available for the profile picture use case. We're planning to add more sample apps and deep dives in the future.

Visit the user-generated content guide

New Node.js sample project

Explore the new Node.js photo album sample project that demonstrates best practices for integrating Cloudinary within a Node.js environment.

Learn more about the Node.js photo album sample project

Announcements

Cloudinary named as Best Overall DevPortal 2024

We're honored to share that Cloudinary’s Doc Portal was named Best Overall SME Developer Portal at the DevPortal Awards in 2024!

We know that great developer documentation is central to your success, and we're committed to providing best-in-class content, code, and UX to help you do incredible work.

No-cache HTTP headers

We're gradually updating our CDN configuration in order to improve control of our distributed assets and prevent unsupported assets from being served to end users.

This change will not impact end users’ experience but it may impact intermediate HTTP proxies/caches, if you have employed those between Cloudinary and your end users.

If you experience any issues or inefficiencies in your delivery chain, please reach out as soon as possible for guidance on how to properly set up your delivery chain.

Neural Artwork Style Transfer add-on deprecated

The Neural Artwork Style Transfer add-on has been deprecated and will no longer work after 31st December 2024.

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