India’s Largest Tours and Activities Website Optimizes User-Uploaded Images to Deliver Faster, Better User Experience
Thrillophilia is India’s largest online tours and activities platform. Through its website and app, the company offers a one-stop solution for travelers looking for tours, activities and things to do. Users can choose from more than 10,000 activities in 200+ cities in India and 15 countries in Asia. Headquartered in Bangalore, India, the company was founded in 2011 and employs more than 50 people.
The Challenge: Managing and Delivering Millions of Images
A visually rich and appealing platform, Thrillophilia supports more than 1 million images, with 250,000+ unique images distributed across 200,000 pages for the 10,000 tours and activities offered on the site. But, because Thrillophilia’s suppliers upload many of the raw images to the site, they often lack visual appeal because they are taken by cell phones or low-end cameras.
“We needed a robust solution to manage our images and deliver them quickly to our visitors - whether they were accessing content on our website or via our mobile app,” said Abhishek Daga, Thrillophilia’s co-founder. “More importantly, to ensure the integrity of our graphics, we needed an efficient means to enhance and autocorrect all images to make them look beautiful.”
With more than 1,000 new images being uploaded to the site each day, Thrillophilia developers found themselves having to focus on image transformation and management, instead of their core duties.
The Cloudinary Solution: Applying Enhancements and Delivering Optimal Images for Users’ Unique Needs
Thrillophilia discovered Cloudinary in 2016, and quickly realized that it was the ideal solution for its image management and optimization needs. “We wanted a product that could take our original images, enhance them, resize them according to viewports and deliver them quickly, so we could ensure an enhanced user experience,” Daga said.
Cloudinary serves as a complete image solution for Thrillophilia. Users or company employees upload raw images in Cloudinary, and then leverage built-in tools like Viesus for automatic image correction and enhancement, and JPEGmini. “We ran multiple tests using Viesus with Cloudinary, and the combination enabled us to get the desired image results we wanted,” Daga added.
Once the images are enhanced, Cloudinary enables Thrillophilia to deliver the images in a variety of sizes, on the fly, to best meet the needs of user Each image is tailored to the user’s unique device, resolution or viewport.
“Cloudinary allows us to be efficient in managing our images,” said Daga. “Images of certain sizes are not created until they are requested by end users. Then we ensure that the correct tags and metadata is associated with each image, and it’s served by the Cloudinary content delivery network.”
The Results: Faster Page Loads and Cutting Amount of Data Served by Half
Daga said that Cloudinary is very easy to use. Thrillophilia was able to get Cloudinary up and running for all its image management within two weeks, and the company saw immediate results.
“There was a significant difference in page load speeds after we started using Cloudinary,” Daga noted. “And by combining JPEGmini and Viesus, we were able to reduce the page size without compromising on image size.”
On average Thrillophilia was serving about 4TB of images per month. However, after adopting Cloudinary, this number was cut in half, saving on storage and bandwidth costs.
