Web development was much simpler only a few years ago, when we were building HTML pages that included images and photos, and all elements shared the same resolution units. If for example, you aimed at a standard 1024x768 screen, you knew these were exactly the number of pixels available for displaying HTML elements and images.
How do you crop an image to a custom shape? How do you add a shadow effect to an image with transparency? How do you add text overlay to an image without using HTML?
If you build or maintain a website with a lot of images, you've probably had many questions like these. Most developers who work with images have scripts or tools that can achieve dozens if not hundreds of image transformations - from basics like crop and resize, to advanced stuff like shadow and transparency, watermarks, face detection, etc. But how do you mix and match these transformations correctly to solve a problem or achieve a certain effect?
Fashion isn't something you'd expect to repeat itself in the technology world - technology advances quickly and hardly ever circles back. But where animated GIFs are involved, it seems like the 90s are here again. Animated GIFs are everywhere, and not only on strange, cheesy web sites - they've become mainstream. You now see short videos shared and played as animated GIFs in reputed sites such as Gawker and TechCrunch.
Image optimization is an important step to reducing page load times, improving user experience and reducing bandwidth costs. When using the JPEG image format, which is best used for photos, the most common optimization is controlling the JPEG quality level.
It’s a common challenge in many mobile and web applications: how do you allow users to upload their own images, while automatically adapting these images to a fixed graphic design?
A classic example is a user uploading a profile picture, but instead of providing a headshot (which is what we really need from them), they upload a picture of their entire body with additional objects in the background. Obviously this image will need to be cropped to the size of the profile picture, while focusing on the user’s face.
Website developers and administrators today tend to find themselves managing quite a few files, images and other media assets. Whether you upload content to your web application yourself, allow your users to upload files or have files imported from content partners, you'll need to handle the upload process, storage, and possibly thumbnail creation required to showcase your assets online.
One of the hardest optimization goals when showing images to your website (and mobile application's) visitors, is to minimize the image file size while maintaining high enough display quality.
Smaller image file sizes directly translate to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and improved user browsing experience. But small file sizes directly translate to lower image quality and may harm visitor satisfaction. Maintaining just the right balance is both crucial and hard.
Do you like to show your photos exactly as they were taken or do you usually tweak them a little to get that extra punch? What about applying artistic filters before sharing them with your friends and family?
Call us prejudice, but as a hardcore Linux guys, the name Microsoft always caused us to flinch a little. That was our initial reaction when we were approached by the Azure team. We have been integrating Cloudinary with many PaaS providers to make our platform as accessible as possible, and Azure actually made perfect sense. Still, we were a bit hesitant at first as we never considered Microsoft a leading player in the world of rapid web & mobile development.