It can be quite a challenge to graphically design a website or mobile application that displays images in very precise shapes and orientations. Product customization can take the form of warping 2D pictures to have a 3D perspective, placing images in precise shapes or overlaying images in specific locations within another image, for example: overlaying an image over the screen of a smartphone.
Content Optimization and Personalization programs can deliver tremendous ROI to an organization but tend to be very resource intensive, requiring developers to build the code for alternate experiences and creative folks to generate the content. Many of the content optimization/personalization tools out there today (Maxymiser, Optimizely, Adobe Target, Ensighten etc.) have created WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors to help relieve the code/development bottleneck but the creative bottleneck stubbornly remains.
Last week I was part of a three member Cloudinary team that attended and exhibited at Web Summit 2015 in Dublin. Just in the last four years, the event has grown from a few hundred people to more than 42,000 people from 134 countries who attended this year.
At the end of 2014, activity on smartphones and tablets accounted for 60% of the time Americans spent online, according to comScore. Given the fast migration to mobile, these figures have been growing every year, and this trend in migration is not limited to the US market alone. According to a recent IDC report, the leading mobile vendors shipped a total of 334.4 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15), up 16% from 288.3 million units in 1Q14. With this rise in mobile adoption, it seems like more users are turning to their mobile devices to perform online activities rather than their desktop computers.
A fresh new lossless image format has recently been introduced. It is called FLIF, which is an acronym for Free Lossless Image Format. According to the creators of FLIF, it is supposed to significantly outperform the other image formats that have lossless modes, such as PNG, WebP and the new BPG format.
If you have an application that allows users to upload their own photos, it can be very useful to be able to organize these photos according to their content. This will allow you to categorize the content for displaying to all your users and make your image library searchable. Furthermore, you can also learn more about your users according to the content they upload and find different trends of what people care about. Other added benefits can also include the ability to display matching content to your users according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.
Back in 2013, Cloudinary published a blog post entitled "Top 10 Mistakes in Handling Website Images". Though these top 10 mistakes still hold true, we've come up with a few additional points that we thought you'd find of interest.
As a website/app developer or owner, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of glitches and mishaps when it comes to users or site visitors sharing your content. Many outlets such as news and media sites, social networks, or eCommerce sites include the option to "like" or "share" content such as blog posts or images. Once shared, the social network site displays a snippet of the shared content alongside a featured image. This way, your site content gets maximum exposure in social networks and attracts additional visitors.
The Internet was abuzz last week after the announcement of Google’s new logo. What caught our eyes more than the artistic changes was this sentence on Google's blog: "building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes". Sounds exciting! But is it correct?
Videos are becoming more prolific with people having the capability to capture videos with a wide variety of cameras, including smartphone cameras that are available almost everywhere. Web and mobile applications that display videos online can be faced with a challenge when the videos are created or uploaded from different devices and in various formats, and then need to be delivered in a multitude of resolutions and aspect ratios to various web browsers, laptops and all kinds of mobile devices in HTML5 web friendly video formats.