Cloudinary Blog

Every picture has a story to tell. But the story it tells can change when you change the color tone, saturation, contrast, or other elements of a photo.

A few years ago, post-processing a digital image generally required a high level of skill and expensive software such as PhotoShop. But in recent years, popular photo sharing apps such as Instagram, Flickr, and Snapchat started offering built-in filters. Professionals take advantage of filters to make subtle corrections or adjustments. Casual users often apply more prominent filters that add their own unique touch or just make their images more fun.

Nowadays, developers everywhere are introduced to an application development trend called serverless computing. The trend isn’t new but rather an evolution culminating from a number of development methodologies, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), distributed cloud computing, Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Containers/Microservices. A key defining element of serverless computing is the serverless application’s logic that combines custom-developed code and 3rd-party service functionality. 

Note: this article was originally published in Smashing Magazine.

Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive images breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve “sensible jumps in file size”. Cloudinary built a tool that implemented this idea, and the response from the community was universal: “Great! Now – what else can it do?” Today, we have an answer: art direction!

I'll start by giving it to you straight:

As part of the recent "auto–everything" launch, we introduced two new transformation parameters – dpr_auto and w_auto, which pair the DPR and Width Client Hints with Cloudinary’s existing image resizing and delivery infrastructure, in order to serve up simple, automatic responsive images.

As a developer, you want to allow your users to download multiple files in a single click. An easy way to download multiple files and share them is to generate a ZIP file. When images are involved, you may also want to normalize the original images before including them in the ZIP file, by scaling them down to the same maximum resolution or converting them to the same format.

It's great to have the capability to transform images on the fly by using dynamic URLs to customize the images to fit the graphic design of your site or mobile application. However, what if you want to transform an image depending on a specific image characteristic (like its width or aspect ratio) or its contents (does it contain a face?). What you need is a way to apply a transformation to an image only if a specific condition is met. Take for example a situation where you have allocated space on your page for a user uploaded image with a width and height of 200 pixels. Furthermore, if the image contains a face you would like to zoom in and focus on the face itself, otherwise you would like to fit the entire image into the available space:

Many of the photos displayed on the internet these days are of people. If your website or mobile application displays photos that include people, you will want to make sure that their faces are included in the delivered images when cropping and transforming them to fit your graphic design and responsive layout. You may even want to further transform an image according to the faces present, for example, adding a harlequin mask overlay on all of their eyes, where each mask is adjusted to the correct size and orientation (although not a typical use case, it's a cool example of using advanced facial attribute detection):