Cloudinary Blog

10 Startup companies that manage their images in the cloud

By Orly Bogler Nov 08, 2012

Since Cloudinary's launch, at the beginning of 2012, we have enjoyed watching many fascinating companies use our service in new and creative ways. Of these companies, many are early-stage startups. These startups are a pleasure to accompany and we enjoy watching them grow with us and with our ever growing list of capabilities and features, many of which were suggested by these companies themselves.

Engine Yard add-on for cloud-based image management

By Itai Lahan Oct 31, 2012

When we first started working on Cloudinary we had a very simple goal in mind - offer a complete alternative to a set of rudimentary, repetitive, universally common web dev tasks. Tasks related to a website's image management needs.

Create Cloud-Based Animation Sequence GIFs

By Itai Lahan Oct 10, 2012

*Update (2015): Before you can use a delivery URL such as the ones described in this post, you must first pre-generate the GIF with a call to the multi method of the upload API. The delivery URLs described in this blog post are used to display the pre-generated animated GIFs. For details, see Creating animated GIFs in the Cloudinary documentation.

RESTful API for Image Management for Your Website's Images and Other Online Assets

By Tal Lev-Ami Oct 09, 2012

Image Management - REST API for Website Image Management

Different online services, websites and mobile applications have very different image management requirements. Despite the differences, the image management pipeline boils down to the same basic formula - upload the images, normalize them, store them and transform them to create derivatives (thumbnails, effects, watermarks, etc.). Afterwards, prepare them for delivery and make sure they are accessible to your users quickly and efficiently when browsing your website or using your mobile app.

Attachinary - a modern attachments solution for Ruby on Rails

By Nadav Soferman Oct 08, 2012

Image Attachment Management Library for Ruby on Rails

When developing a website you are required for a somewhat tedious work of handling dynamically uploaded content. The constantly added content includes images uploaded by your users and content administrator, user documents and other files.

Automatic face-blurring in images made easy

By Nadav Soferman Sep 11, 2012

Automatically Blur Faces by Using the Pixelate Effect on Photos

After our recent, somewhat technical posts, we wanted to lighten things up with Cloudinary's latest (cool) semantic image transformation feature. Keeping people privacy in photos by automatically blurring their faces.

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.