At Feature Upvote, we specialize in enabling product managers to consolidate and prioritize customer feedback through simple online boards with a built-in voting capability. Companies across the world use our boards either publicly or privately to source ideas from their internal teams or B2B clients.
Early on, however, we ran into a problem: Our customers wanted their commenters to be able to attach images. That was a perfectly understandable, reasonable request because, after all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Words are all too often not enough and a screenshot or mockup could clearly and succinctly complement a message
So, we quickly got to work to build a media-hosting tool through Amazon Web Services (AWS)—only to run into two major issues: ease of use and optimization. After more brainstorming, we decided that building such a tool in-house from scratch was an unrealistic fool’s errand. Surely there was a company with a product or service that would meet our needs?
That was when we found Cloudinary.
Why Building an Image-upload Widget Yourself Is a Bad Idea
We're a SaaS business and our CEO is a developer by trade—not short on software talent at all. However, numerous roadblocks stood in our way of building an image-upload widget. To name only two—
- One of Feature Upvote’s selling points is that it works smoothly on all modern devices. But how do we make it easy and fast to upload images, regardless of device? That’s tough to do. Trust us, we tried.
- Serving unoptimized images wastes bandwidth and causes slow performance, frustrating customers to no end. Serving images in the optimize size and format is hard.
Cloudinary solved both problems for us.
How Cloudinary Offers the Full Feature Set We Needed
Cloudinary offers all the features we were looking for, namely, upload, storage, and optimal delivery of images.
The image-upload widget was what really sold us on Cloudinary. Getting started with the widget was easy: All we had to do was add a JavaScript snippet to our site. The widget works brilliantly on all the devices on which we tested it.
In short, we found Cloudinary extremely easy to use and our experience has been flawless.
How It Took Us Only One Afternoon to Integrate et With Cloudinary
Integrating Cloudinary into Feature Upvote was straightforward. What helped a lot was that Cloudinary features a Java library andour back end is in Java.
Not the least, we found it a cakewalk to find the best approach for serving images. That was because, with Cloudinary, we could scale and transform images merely by adding parameters to their URLs. Absolutely terrific..
How Cloudinary Makes Us More Productive
First up, Cloudinary helped us achieve in a day or two what might have taken weeks, months, or even years of intense development. Consequently, we saved many thousands of dollars and ended up with a more robust, efficient system than what we could have clobbered together ourselves.
Since the initial setup, we've discovered unexpected productivity savings:
- From the Cloudinary dashboard, we can easily pinpoint images that are taking up far too much bandwidth. We can then investigate and take corrective action, if necessary.
- Cloudinary's auto-tagging capability has helped us organize our media library big time. With Cloudinary's smart APIs, we’ve tagged each and every image with an ID unique to each customer.
- Those housekeeping tasks go a long way in enabling us to keep track of image ownership by customer. Also, cleaning our media library as customers move on takes only one simple step: Ask the Cloudinary API to delete all the images with a particular tag.
Perfect.
