A fresh new lossless image format has recently been introduced. It is called FLIF, which is an acronym for Free Lossless Image Format. According to the creators of FLIF, it is supposed to significantly outperform the other image formats that have lossless modes, such as PNG, WebP and the new BPG format.
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?
If your web or mobile application involves user-generated content, you may encounter users who upload inappropriate photos or images to your application. These could be images which offend other users - adult content, violent photos, etc. - or images which cause your site to violate laws or regulations.
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.
There are many ways to optimize PNG files, but one optimization which is commonly overlooked involves the PNG's transparent background. If you’ve chosen to use PNGs instead of a more compact format like JPG, mainly for the PNG's support of a transparent background (alpha channel), read on and see how dynamic underlays can reduce your file size by as much as 1:5.
The modern world of mobile applications and dynamic websites is incredibly rich with images.
Major online newspapers are overhauling their UI design with wall to wall photographs. Social network feeds are chock-full of shared pictures, and eCommerce solutions are constantly improving their viewing widgets with additional product images.
Website owners and application developers know that analytics and usage monitoring tools play a major role in growing their products and making them effective, and highly tuned to their customers needs.
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.