This year at SXSW, we’re infusing Cloudinary’s powerful Visual APIs to the SXSW Hackathon, where teams compete on high-tech creativity during a straight 24-hour programming event. Taking place at TechSpace, this exciting event will culminate with demos and awards at the Hilton (Salon C) on Wed, March 15 at 2pm.
Everyone knows the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. But what most people don’t realize about images is what needs to be taken into consideration when using them on websites and in mobile apps.
Controlling who can access your images and videos, and when, can be an important concern for your business and security workflow. You may have resources that you only want some of your users or employees to access, or you may need to make sure that your original resources are secure, and only transformed (edited) versions of your resources are delivered, e.g., with a watermark or logo displayed.
File upload through AJAX techniques can be daunting because of the large amount of code, let alone the painstaking tasks involved, such as the following:
No sweat, however, thanks to Cloudinary, a cloud-based, end-to-end media-management solution that automates and streamlines the workflow for media assets, including images, videos, and audios. Specifically, Cloudinary selects, uploads, analyzes, manipulates, optimizes, and delivers those assets across devices in short order. Be sure to sign up for a FREE Cloudinary account and try this for yourself.
At Build.com, where I’m a software architect, we manage hundreds of millions of images. Our site offers more than 1 million home improvement products, such as tubs, toilets, cabinets, fireplaces – really any thing homeowners need for their improvement projects. And for each item, there are multiple images – product and gallery images, action shots, close-ups and thumbnails – that our visitors view from a variety of devices, including mobile phones, tablets, their desktop computers and our native app. In addition, these images are used in many view templates – on the landing page, via search, by category and in the cart.
Most developers are familiar with ImageMagick, a very capable open source software suite that they can use to manage and transform images.
The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command-line, but wrappers have been written for a wide selection of programming languages, making ImageMagick a very popular choice among developers.
There’s no debating the fact that including images on your website or mobile app draws the interest of users and leads to stronger engagement. For example, posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts, according to a WebDAM infographic. Use of attention-grabbing images is only going to grow. Consider that by 2018, 84 percent of communication will be visual, the infographic noted.
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed (rather abstractly) what it means for an image to be “responsive.” In short, a responsive image is a variable image that adapts to fit variable contexts, in order to provide a great experience to users no matter what their screen, browser, network connection, or device may be.
With the decreasing price-performance ratio of computing, research efforts in face detection and face recognition algorithms are rapidly expanding and new techniques for both of these are achieving greater accuracy and reduced processing time.
Images – if you’re a developer, there’s no doubt that at one time or another, you’ve probably worked with a lot of image files, and may have been tasked with ensuring a top-notch user experience or continually improving website and app performance. You may have posed questions on online message boards, or sought advice from your developer colleagues. But there hasn’t been a conference that solely focused on image management…until now.