Cloudinary Blog

Automatic backup of user uploaded images using Cloudinary

By Nadav Soferman Jul 18, 2012

As a website owner, you know the importance of having a robust web-based service. When a downtime may result in lost revenues, you strive to keep a highly available online solution.

A major part of having a robust service is a good contingency plan, that ultimately depends on regular backups of your website’s data. Your website’s code is probably backed up regularly, and so is your database, but have you given thought to backing up your dynamic website assets, such as your users’ uploaded images?

Cloud-based API for applying effects on images

By Nadav Soferman Jun 18, 2012

Create Image Effects and Filters by Using Cloud-Based API

If you Google for “Hello Cloudinary”, you will find some intriguing articles claiming that Cloudinary is a Photoshop replacement. Well, although the comparison is very flattering and we do believe that Cloudinary is a fantastic service for web developers, we never thought of our service as a replacement for Photoshop. However, some image transformation features of Cloudinary allow web developers and web designers to dynamically modify the look & feel of their website’s images in an extremely easy way without manually processing their images using an image editing desktop software. In this blog post we wanted to describe some of Cloudinary’s newest features - applying effects and filters on images.

The Need for Cloud-Based Auto-Rotated Images

By Itai Lahan Jun 13, 2012

Several years ago, a good friend of mine showed me a cool graphic design concept for his new web-based startup company. It looked pretty great. What really caught my eye was the designer’s unique use of visitor profile photos. You see, when a visitor registered to the service and uploaded his photo, the designer envisioned a large, faded, B&W, slightly rotated version of the same profile photo being used as the background image for the visitor’s personal home page. I thought for a minute and told my friend to let this one go.

Placeholder images and Gravatar integration with Cloudinary

By Nadav Soferman May 30, 2012

Most web sites enrich their graphics by embedding pictures and photos of their model entities - users, articles, movies, etc. The graphic design of such web sites assumes that all these entities have associated pictures, otherwise the result will not look as satisfactory as intended. The graphics designer will not like it and the developer having to handle the boundary case of missing images won’t enjoy this either.

Use Ruby on Rails to Deliver Static Images Via CDN

By Nadav Soferman May 15, 2012

If you heard of Cloudinary before, you probably already know how useful Cloudinary is with managing all your dynamically uploaded images, transforming these to their required dimensions, performing image optimization to ensure files are have the optimal quality and parameters, and delivering them through a fast CDN.

Cloudinary's jQuery plugin for embedding and transforming images

By Itai Lahan May 03, 2012

As web developers, we closely monitor the shifts in today's modern web applications architecture stack. We find the client vs. server-side HTML rendering debate particularly interesting.

In the past several years, we’ve witnessed the enormous rise in popularity of client-side JS/CoffeeScript MVC & MVVM solutions. From popular libraries such as Backbone.js that strive to add basic structure to client-side apps, all the way to feature-rich libraries that manage your entire client-side stack, with data-binding, client-server model sync, dependency tracking, templates and more. The involvement of high-profile companies and individuals in this market is also fascinating, between KnockoutJS contributions from Microsoft, the Google-backed Angular and Yehuda Katz's Ember, the heat is definitely on.

Using Cloudinary for Website Asset Management in the Cloud

By Nadav Soferman May 01, 2012

When we conceived Cloudinary, our vision was to help with website asset management (images, Javascripts, CSS, etc.) in the cloud, easily and effectively. Our initial focus was on image management in the cloud since we've felt that this particular area was significantly underdeveloped. We figured that every web developer would be happy with a solid solution for image file uploads, applying image transformations in the Cloud and getting their website's images delivered through a fast CDN.

CDN for Images: Optimize and Deliver Images Faster

By Tal Lev-Ami Apr 27, 2012

Most leading blogs deliver their assets (images, JS, CSS, etc.) through state-of-the-art CDNs and utilize online resizing technologies. With faster, off-site access, they greatly improve their users’ browsing experience, while reducing load on their servers.

Cloudinary as the server-side for Javascript image cropping libraries

By Nadav Soferman Apr 22, 2012

Cloudinary provides many built-in image resizing and cropping options: filling or fitting to required dimensions, scaling image up or down, cropping to a thumbnail, and so forth. When cropping you'll need to specify an anchor, or gravity. The image crop can be anchored to the image's center, top, left, etc. The cropping can even be relative to faces detected in the image.

Adding Rounded Corners to Images and Cropping Images to Circles

By Nadav Soferman Apr 16, 2012

Twitter and Facebook. One adds rounded corners to their user’s profile pictures. The other doesn’t. Can you recall which service is the one adding rounded corners?

At the moment, the right answer is Twitter, though if you guessed Facebook you weren’t far off. Both services have on-and-off relations with rounded cornered images, and Facebook tried different designs before backing out of rounded corners for the time being.