We all know that images attract interest and increase engagement, but with the huge overload of images out there, we sometimes need to get creative to stand out in the crowd. Your users who upload photos to your site or app may also be looking for those same creative opportunities. A quick look at the most popular social media apps and their continually increasing toolbox of special photo effects shows the increasing trend in popularity and demand for these fun ways of expressing one’s identity.
Who doesn't love some striking imagery to drive your point home? Whether you're selling a product or service, trying to communicate complex ideas, or simply captivate the emotions of your users, pictures can do that. Everyone knows they work, and everyone loves them.
No programmer could imagine a world without variables. Neither can Cloudinary. That’s why Cloudinary now offers image transformations that support user-defined variables.
Using Cloudinary, you can already deliver transformed images with a variety of transformations, including resizing, cropping, rotating, a huge toolbox of special effects and filters, text and image overlays, and more, all of which you can deliver responsively, on-the-fly, and optimized for quick delivery via CDN.
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.