Back in 2013, Cloudinary published a blog post entitled "Top 10 Mistakes in Handling Website Images". Though these top 10 mistakes still hold true, we've come up with a few additional points that we thought you'd find of interest.
As a website/app developer or owner, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of glitches and mishaps when it comes to users or site visitors sharing your content. Many outlets such as news and media sites, social networks, or eCommerce sites include the option to "like" or "share" content such as blog posts or images. Once shared, the social network site displays a snippet of the shared content alongside a featured image. This way, your site content gets maximum exposure in social networks and attracts additional visitors.
The Internet was abuzz last week after the announcement of Google’s new logo. What caught our eyes more than the artistic changes was this sentence on Google's blog: "building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes". Sounds exciting! But is it correct?
Various factors can have an effect on the visual quality of photos captured by a wide variety of digital cameras. Technical limitations of cameras, coupled with changing conditions in which users take photos, results in a wide range of visual quality. Camera-related limitations arise from a combination of poor optics, noisy sensors, and the modest capabilities of mobile camera phones that are used to take photos in conditions that range from bright daylight to indoor scenes with incandescent light or even dark night scenes.
Responsive web design is a method of designing websites to provide an optimal viewing experience to users, irrespective of the device, window size, orientation, or resolution used to view the website. A site designed responsively adapts its layout to the viewing environment, resizing and moving elements dynamically and based on the properties of the browser or device the site is being displayed on.
Many websites now offer their users the ability to upload images and profile pictures, making it a challenge for web designers to maintain a certain graphic design and style when subsequently displaying these images. The profile pictures may need to be smartly cropped to focus on the faces, with some sites that prefer close-ups of faces and others that prefer including more background when displaying images of people.
Rails is a great web development framework that was recently considered the coolest framework around. While other frameworks have gained popularity over time, Rails remains one of the most popular web development frameworks to date..
Update - April 2016: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on by Microsoft. See Facial attribute detection with Microsoft's Face API and the Advanced facial attributes detection add-on documentation.
Update - December 2015: The add-on described in this post is no longer available since ReKognition terminated their services. However, all features described here are still available via a different and even better add-on: Advanced Facial Attributes Detection
It is common for e-commerce, media, and news sites to remove image backgrounds or make them transparent in order to place the main element of the image on either white or color backgrounds. The final result better integrates an image into a site or specific page’s graphic design. For example, a fashion site that presents clothes or shoes should have the main element of a photo (e.g. shoes) extracted from the original image background, then edited to fit the site’s catalogue design and structure.