Cloudinary Blog

For our first in a series of Q&A posts with our ImageCon 2018 speakers, we spoke with Ryan Cooke, a Software Engineer and Android Developer at Pinterest, a site that serves up billions of images everyday. In the following post he discusses why improving mobile images was important for improving the user experience and offers advice on building a mobile-first site.

Cloudinary is a cloud-based, end-to-end solution for downloading, storing, editing, optimizing, and delivering images and videos. Note that editing means that you can transform images and videos, that is, resize and add numerous effects to them.

Search ranking algorithms utilize various signals to determine how websites rank against each other on the internet either via desktop or mobile searches. One such signal is Site speed. In 2010, Google introduced Site speed as a signal in their search ranking algorithms. However, this only applied to web search ranking. Starting in July 2018, site speed will be a ranking factor of mobile searches. This change is another signal that developers must wake up and focus on improving the performance of their applications, since speed and load time affects a user’s experience of your page.

In the previous post, we showed how to upload images to a Cloudinary server. In this part, we will play with some of the features we see on the WhatsApp technology. After you or your users have uploaded image assets to Cloudinary, you can deliver them via dynamic URLs. You can include instructions in your dynamic URLs that tell Cloudinary to transform your assets using a set of transformation parameters. All image transformations and image optimizations are performed automatically in the cloud and your transformed assets are automatically optimized before they are routed through a fast CDN to the end user for an optimal user experience. For example, you can resize and crop, add overlays, blur or pixelate faces, apply a variety of special effects and filters, and apply settings to optimize your images and to deliver them responsively.

As mobile developers, when talking about images and videos, one of our main concerns is creating a smooth and amazing experience for our users, no matter what kind of device or network connection they are using. In this article, I’m going to show you how you can easily improve this experience using Cloudinary and Fresco.

Developing applications for mobile consumption requires facing, and overcoming, some difficult challenges. Apps need to limit their RAM, CPU and battery usage while still performing the required tasks in a reasonable time frame. If too many background tasks are running, the mobile device can become sluggish, with the battery running out very quickly. Coordination with other apps is crucial to keep the device responsive and make the battery last longer.

Embedding and managing images and other media content in a mobile application is always challenging. The processes of downloading a media file from the web, storing it on the device, and then displaying it to the user are surprisingly and often frustratingly complex from a coding perspective. In addition, you probably want to add code that enables reusing images rather than downloading it every time, but you have to be smart about it to avoid clogging the precious storage space on your customer's device. Furthermore, your design probably requires that images be displayed in different sizes and DPRs in different devices, but creating and maintaining multiple versions of every image manually is virtually impossible.