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.
Online advertising is one of the most popular tools to drive traffic to your website and mobile application in a consistent and cost-effective manner. Online text ads play a very big role in this strategy.
Modern image compression techniques have had a large impact on our lifestyle. Digital cameras can save thousands of high-quality photos on a single memory card, smartphones can quickly share high resolution images on-the-fly, and websites and mobile apps can show rich media quickly. All of this just couldn,t have worked if image data was stored at its original, raw form.
Two decades ago websites had such a simple usage flow. Web servers returned complete HTML pages and each user action required that a new HTML page be reloaded from the server. Later on Ajax joined the game allowing dynamic updating of specific web page fragments via simple Javascript requests to the server. Google's wide-spread use of Ajax with Gmail was simply mind blowing at the time. Today's product requirements wouldn't settle even for that.
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?
Web applications and web APIs are usually programmed to perform requests in a synchronous manner. A common web-based access flow will start with a requester accessing a remote service. The remote service in turn will process the request and quickly return the result.
We are often asked to share our customer stories with the rest of the Cloudinary community. Whether it's for learning about others experiences managing images with Cloudinary, or just to reaffirm Cloudinary's solution - we love to hear your stories and we're happy to share them.
More and more developers are getting to know the power of the cloud. In today's web application development world you can leverage the cloud to build large scale applications so quickly and easily that it's simply mind-boggling that you get all of this while still keeping on a very reasonable budget.
Modifying an image opacity so the image is semi-transparent is a common requirement when implementing modern graphics design. Reducing image opacity allows background images to feel less dominant. Reducing opacity also allows layering of multiple images one on top of the other, an important step when adding watermarks, badges and textual overlays to images.