Overlaying text on images is a versatile and effective way in which to spotlight captions, names, copyright watermarks, and such. You can also overlay text over dynamic images (advertisement banners, coupons, greeting cards, business cards) in e-commerce-oriented emails.
As computer users, we constantly upload files, transferring them from one system to another over a network. You can perform uploads on a terminal, such as through the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) or Secure Copy Protocol (SCP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) clients, or web browsers. Generally, you upload files to move data to a server or a managed service like cloud storage, but you can also send files between distributed clients.
Updates since publication:
- Following Google's shutdown of its legacy Google+ API in March 2019, the Google+ (gplus) option is no longer available.
- Following changes made by Instagram in June 2020, the Instagram (instagram_name) option is no longer available.
Nowadays, users can and often upload various media files to social networks, websites, and messaging apps. Most of those media are images and videos, with a significant number being audio files. Subsequently, to create a thumbnail to depict an image, a site or app would crop and then resize it to scale. To depict a video, they would convert, crop, and resize a single frame from it as a thumbnail.
Every image is unique, so are website visitors. In a perfect world, we would adapt images to be "just right" for all users, i.e., perfectly cropped with responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings, and optimal quality in the most suitable format.
See this example of a photo of a cat:
Short videos of animated GIFs are spreading like wildfire around the web, especially in media and news sites, and people frequently share animated GIFs on social apps. However, because those GIFs are not optimized, their sizes are huge, consuming heavy bandwidth and slowing down page loads. Also, resizing and transforming a large number of animated GIFs, one by one, to match the graphic design of your site or app is a lengthy, CPU-intensive process.
Images. More likely than not, your web or mobile app is filled to the brim with images, which, from graphical appeal to size and access times, figure prominently in the browsing experience. Image appeal could motivate visitors to return and, in the case of e-commerce, become customers.
No matter how outstanding the page design is, many of the images that you as web developers must embed are not in your direct control. Not to mention that social websites contain user-uploaded profile photos; the product photos on e-commerce sites are too numerous to be edited one at a time; and media outlets invariably contain many photographs of different standards.
Cloudinary offers an automated tool that tweaks and retouches images by sharpening or blurring them. Obviously, you can also sharpen blurry images with that option.
Modern websites and mobile apps frequently showcase images of various dimensions, sometimes varying the graphics, resolutions, and look and feel for different devices (desktop, mobile, etc.); and revamping the graphics with upgrades.
A key benefit Cloudinary offers is an easy, intuitive, and flexible process of modifying images. A case in point: by setting simple parameters in our dynamic URLs, you can resize or crop images, alter their shapes, and apply effects. After transforming images on the fly in the cloud and optimizing the resulting thumbnails, Cloudinary delivers them through a fast content delivery network (CDN).
All that makes it a snap to view the various images derived from a single high-resolution source. Here's an example of a dynamic image-transformation URL in action:
Even though the image format animated GIFs are gaining popularity, their file size is usually large, causing slow loading and incurring high bandwidth costs. Besides, the GIF format is old and not optimized for modern video clips. The developer’s job of effecting fast loading of animated GIFs and delivering optimized images is complex and time-consuming.
Knowledge is power. And if you allow your users to upload images, you also probably want to better understand what their images contain. Whether a photo is of a building, people, animals, celebrities, or a product, image processing and analysis can assist in further comprehension. The benefits of this knowledge can go beyond "merely" categorizing your content and making your image library searchable: drawing insights from user generated content can be very useful! What better way to learn more about your users than to analyze the images they upload and find out what they care about and then have the ability to display relevant content to them according to their interests or even match them with other users that share similar interests.