I still remember well my first week as a DevOps at Cloudinary. The year was 2017. Everything was new to me—people, laptop, processes—all of which to become familiar with in short order. A mantra often repeated to me in those days was that, Cloudinary being a SaaS, continuous service uptime is its most important goal.
Transforming images with Cloudinary is simple, right? You find the ones you want and add them to your URL, building them up and trying them out until they’re perfect. You can then save the transformations that you created as named transformations for reuse. That final step sounds straightforward, but up until now has been a little tricky. With Cloudinary’s slick and new UI, creating and managing transformations through the Management Console just got even simpler. That UI now includes—
Slideshows. Though sometimes boring, they are an essential cog in the corporate wheel, having served for decades as the medium for presentations. For a more lively display, consider combining various media types into a single video slideshow, which could serve as compelling, personalized, and engaging content for your users. Additionally, you can apply sophisticated transition configurations and Cloudinary’s many transformation capabilities.
I can be quite passionate about image codecs. A “codec battle” is brewing, and I’m not the only one to have opinions about that. Obviously, as the chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee, I’m firmly in the camp of the codec I’ve been working on for years. Here in this post, however, I’ll strive to be fair and neutral.
AVIF is a new image format for the web. Before I tell you all about it, let me show you what AVIF can do.
One way to compare image codecs is to encode the same image in different formats at matched file sizes and then compare the visual quality of the resulting images. For example, I rendered the AVIF below with a q_50 quality transformation. It weighs 12.3 KB and, compared to the lossless original it looks pretty good subjectively.
US consumers spent $211.5 billion during the second quarter of 2020 on e-commerce, up 31.8% quarter over quarter. Meanwhile, McKinsey found there were as many e-commerce deliveries made over the course of eight weeks in 2020 as there had been in the past decade.
Every year in early February, after closing our fiscal year, we discuss the year that was during our monthly All Hands meeting. This year we reflected on a year unlike any other.
It was a year in which the unimaginable became our shared reality. Together, as a global collective, with our families, customers and partners, we Zoomed and pushed and pulled together in ways we had not had to do before.
Is your web page speed a pitfall or a profit driver? If you don’t stay on top of optimizing rich media on your website, chances are your web performance is actively (and financially) working against you.