Cloudinary Blog

Nadav Soferman

Co-Founder, CPO

Nadav is a true cloud expert. A veteran of the Israeli hi-tech industry, Nadav worked at various Internet startups for the past 17 years - developing web & mobile software and managing development teams.

Overlaying Text on Images, Pixel Perfect With No CSS Or HTML

By Nadav Soferman Sep 20, 2020

Overlaying Text on Images, Pixel Perfect With No CSS Or HTML

Overlaying text on images is a versatile and effective way in which to spotlight captions, names, copyright watermarks, and such. You can also overlay text over dynamic images (advertisement banners, coupons, greeting cards, business cards) in e-commerce-oriented emails.

By Nadav Soferman Aug 05, 2020

Updates since publication:

Following Google's shutdown of its legacy Google+ API in March 2019, the Google+ (gplus) option is no longer available.
Following changes made by Instagram in June 2020, the Instagram (instagram_name) option is no longer available.

By Nadav Soferman Mar 29, 2020

Adding Watermarks, Credits, Badges, and Text Overlays to Images

Adding watermarks to images and videos, a common practice at major news outlets and blogs, ensures that no one can circulate those media without owner authorization and that no one takes undue credit for their creation. Watermarks are also a must for stock-photo sites that offer previews of images and videos for purchase. Embedding the photographer’s name to or crediting a source in photos is a standard routine.

By Nadav Soferman Mar 21, 2020

Auto-Crop Images for Responsive Designs and Higher Quality

Every image is unique, so are website visitors. In a perfect world, we would adapt images to be "just right" for all users, i.e., perfectly cropped with responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings, and optimal quality in the most suitable format.

See this example of a photo of a cat:

By Nadav Soferman Mar 15, 2020

Short videos of animated GIFs are spreading like wildfire around the web, especially in media and news sites, and people frequently share animated GIFs on social apps. However, because those GIFs are not optimized, their sizes are huge, consuming heavy bandwidth and slowing down page loads. Also, resizing and transforming a large number of animated GIFs, one by one, to match the graphic design of your site or app is a lengthy, CPU-intensive process.

By Nadav Soferman Mar 07, 2020

How to Sharpen Or Blur Images Through Automation

Images. More likely than not, your web or mobile app is filled to the brim with images, which, from graphical appeal to size and access times, figure prominently in the browsing experience. Image appeal could motivate visitors to return and, in the case of e-commerce, become customers.

No matter how outstanding the page design is, many of the images that you as web developers must embed are not in your direct control. Not to mention that social websites contain user-uploaded profile photos; the product photos on e-commerce sites are too numerous to be edited one at a time; and media outlets invariably contain many photographs of different standards.

Cloudinary offers an automated tool that tweaks and retouches images by sharpening or blurring them. Obviously, you can also sharpen blurry images with that option.

By Nadav Soferman Feb 02, 2020

Secure Image Transformations With Signed URLs

Modern websites and mobile apps frequently showcase images of various dimensions, sometimes varying the graphics, resolutions, and look and feel for different devices (desktop, mobile, etc.); and revamping the graphics with upgrades.

A key benefit Cloudinary offers is an easy, intuitive, and flexible process of modifying images. A case in point: by setting simple parameters in our dynamic URLs, you can resize or crop images, alter their shapes, and apply effects. After transforming images on the fly in the cloud and optimizing the resulting thumbnails, Cloudinary delivers them through a fast content delivery network (CDN).

All that makes it a snap to view the various images derived from a single high-resolution source. Here's an example of a dynamic image-transformation URL in action:

By Nadav Soferman Nov 28, 2017

Cloud-Based Video Content Management Platform for Developers

Videos in web sites and apps are starting to catch up with images in terms of popularity and they are a constantly growing part of the media strategy for most organizations. This means bigger challenges for developers who need to handle these videos in their web sites and mobile apps. Cloudinary's mission is to solve all developer needs around image and video content management. In this blog post, we are excited to introduce Cloudinary's complete cloud-based video content management solution for developers.

By Nadav Soferman Jun 01, 2017

JavaScript Drag and Drop File Upload Widget UI

As developers of web apps, you often need to let users upload files to your app - mainly images and videos. You want the upload interface you provide to offer an intuitive user experience, including the ability to drag & drop multiple media files, preview thumbnails of selected images and videos, view upload progress indication and more. Since we now all live in the cloud era, chances are that many of your users also store media files in the cloud rather than only locally on hard drives and mobile devices, so the option to pick files from social networks like Facebook, cloud storage services such as Dropbox, photo services like Google Photos and more is a big advantage.

By Nadav Soferman Jan 26, 2016

Generate Automatic and Image-Specific Responsive Breakpoints

The number of different devices available and their potential screen resolutions keep increasing, and to support this wide range of resolutions and devices, responsive website design is now the standard. A website's markup must adapt itself to look perfect on all the different devices and in various resolutions, pixel densities and mobile device orientations. Managing, transforming and delivering images, is one of the main challenges of breakpoints for responsive design that web developers face.