Cloudinary Blog

Archive for 2012 - Page 2

How to quickly build a stock photo site using Cloudinary

By Tal Lev-Ami Aug 30, 2012

Image Authentication and Delivery of Private Images

UPDATE - Since this post was published, we have added a more advanced solution that allows delivering private and authenticated images to your users. See the documentation on Media access control for more details.

Different web applications have very different requirements when images are involved. A dating website will focus its image-related attention on normalizing and delivering his user uploaded snapshots. A pinterest style service is focused on retrieving external images from around the web and fitting them to its cool layout. An eCommerce website is focused on the effective delivery of the many product thumbnails it depicts.

Direct Image Uploads From the Browser to the Cloud With jQuery

By Nadav Soferman Aug 28, 2012

Upload Images with jQuery From the Browser to the Cloud

Where do you host all of your website's assets - still on your own web servers?

In modern websites, images alone contribute to more than 50% of a website’s load time, and recent studies show that even a 1 second delay in a page's load speed can result in more than 5% loss in conversion. The impact of correctly delivering your website's images to your viewers is staggering. Luckily, Cloudinary offers a simple way to upload your website's images to the cloud, automatically transform them according to your needs and deliver them optimized through a fast CDN employing industry best practices.

Generating video thumbnails from YouTube and other video sites

By Nadav Soferman Aug 08, 2012

Websites, blogs and web applications regularly embed video content from various video service providers such as YouTube and Vimeo. Videos are usually depicted using image thumbnails, tweaked to fit the graphics design of the website. When a video thumbnail is clicked, the actual video content starts playing.

Heroku add-on for image management in the cloud

By Itai Lahan Jul 20, 2012

When we first started developing web apps with Ruby on Rails, some six years ago, we struggled with finding a good IDE. We settled for Eclipse with RadRails (still developing on PCs at that time...), but kept our eyes open for new and promising IDEs. At late 2007, a very surprising contender caught our eyes, it was called ‘Heroku’ and it offered an amazing concept - a fully featured IDE for Ruby-on-Rails that was completely online, available through your favorite browser.

Automatic backup of user uploaded images using Cloudinary

By Nadav Soferman Jul 18, 2012

As a website owner, you know the importance of having a robust web-based service. When a downtime may result in lost revenues, you strive to keep a highly available online solution.

A major part of having a robust service is a good contingency plan, that ultimately depends on regular backups of your website’s data. Your website’s code is probably backed up regularly, and so is your database, but have you given thought to backing up your dynamic website assets, such as your users’ uploaded images?

Cloud-based API for applying effects on images

By Nadav Soferman Jun 18, 2012

Create Image Effects and Filters by Using Cloud-Based API

If you Google for “Hello Cloudinary”, you will find some intriguing articles claiming that Cloudinary is a Photoshop replacement. Well, although the comparison is very flattering and we do believe that Cloudinary is a fantastic service for web developers, we never thought of our service as a replacement for Photoshop. However, some image transformation features of Cloudinary allow web developers and web designers to dynamically modify the look & feel of their website’s images in an extremely easy way without manually processing their images using an image editing desktop software. In this blog post we wanted to describe some of Cloudinary’s newest features - applying effects and filters on images.

The Need for Cloud-Based Auto-Rotated Images

By Itai Lahan Jun 13, 2012

Several years ago, a good friend of mine showed me a cool graphic design concept for his new web-based startup company. It looked pretty great. What really caught my eye was the designer’s unique use of visitor profile photos. You see, when a visitor registered to the service and uploaded his photo, the designer envisioned a large, faded, B&W, slightly rotated version of the same profile photo being used as the background image for the visitor’s personal home page. I thought for a minute and told my friend to let this one go.

Placeholder images and Gravatar integration with Cloudinary

By Nadav Soferman May 30, 2012

Most web sites enrich their graphics by embedding pictures and photos of their model entities - users, articles, movies, etc. The graphic design of such web sites assumes that all these entities have associated pictures, otherwise the result will not look as satisfactory as intended. The graphics designer will not like it and the developer having to handle the boundary case of missing images won’t enjoy this either.

Use Ruby on Rails to Deliver Static Images Via CDN

By Nadav Soferman May 15, 2012

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, performing image optimization to ensure files are have the optimal quality and parameters, and delivering them through a fast CDN.

Cloudinary's jQuery plugin for embedding and transforming images

By Itai Lahan May 03, 2012

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.