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, cheesy 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 transformations 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.
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 eCommerce 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 transform 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).
There are many ways to optimize PNG files, but one optimization which is commonly overlooked involves the PNG's transparent background. If you’ve chosen to use PNGs instead of a more compact format like JPG, mainly for the PNG's support of a transparent background (alpha channel), read on and see how dynamic underlays can reduce your file size by as much as 1:5.
Thumbnails of website screenshots are a common visual design element. Search engines, such as Google, display webpage screenshots in their search results. Social news sites, such as DZone, embed screenshot thumbnails of shared pages. Bloggers and technology news sites embed screenshots of company websites and online services they discuss in their posts. Development companies embed screenshots of websites they helped develop.
Website developers and administrators today tend to find themselves managing quite a few files, images and other media assets. Whether you upload content to your web application yourself, allow your users to upload files or have files imported from content partners, you'll need to handle the upload process, storage, and possibly thumbnail creation required to showcase your assets online.