In a previous post we've shown how you can easily manage your Ruby on Rails image uploads with CarrierWave and Cloudinary. Many of our Rails readers found this very useful, as it depicted a powerful image management solution that is trivial to integrate - use the popular CarrierWave GEM together with the Cloudinary GEM, add a single 'include' line to your code and that's it. All your images are automatically uploaded to the cloud and delivered through a fast CDN. Better yet, all image transformations defined in your CarrierWave uploader class are generated in the cloud by Cloudinary. No need to install and setup any image processing library (goodbye RMagick, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick, MiniMagick, etc.). You also don't need to worry any more about CPU power, storage space, image syncing between multiple servers, backup and scale.
Graphic designers often contemplate whether to add borders to their website elements. The decision of whether to add borders around frames, buttons and text elements really depends on the feeling the designer is trying to convey through the design.
When images are involved, web developers have a large set of relevant tools at their disposal. You can display images in your web sites and mobile applications. You can transform and transform such images using image editing and transformation software or cloud-based solutions like Cloudinary. But there are other types of data embedded in image files that can add unique semantic information to the images and are hardly ever used.
When we first started working on Cloudinary we had a very simple goal in mind - offer a complete alternative to a set of rudimentary, repetitive, universally common web dev tasks. Tasks related to a website's image management needs.
*Update (2015): Before you can use a delivery URL such as the ones described in this post, you must first pre-generate the GIF with a call to the multi method of the upload API. The delivery URLs described in this blog post are used to display the pre-generated animated GIFs. For details, see Creating animated GIFs in the Cloudinary documentation.
Different online services, websites and mobile applications have very different image management requirements. Despite the differences, the image management pipeline boils down to the same basic formula - upload the images, normalize them, store them and transform them to create derivatives (thumbnails, effects, watermarks, etc.). Afterwards, prepare them for delivery and make sure they are accessible to your users quickly and efficiently when browsing your website or using your mobile app.
When developing a website you are required for a somewhat tedious work of handling dynamically uploaded content. The constantly added content includes images uploaded by your users and content administrator, user documents and other files.
After our recent, somewhat technical posts, we wanted to lighten things up with Cloudinary's latest (cool) semantic image transformation feature. Keeping people privacy in photos by automatically blurring their faces.
UPDATE - Since this post was published, we have added a more advanced solution that allows delivering private and authenticated images to your users. See the documentation on Media access control for more details.
Different web applications have very different requirements when images are involved. A dating website will focus its image-related attention on normalizing and delivering his user uploaded snapshots. A pinterest style service is focused on retrieving external images from around the web and fitting them to its cool layout. An eCommerce website is focused on the effective delivery of the many product thumbnails it depicts.
Where do you host all of your website's assets - still on your own web servers?
In modern websites, images alone contribute to more than 50% of a website’s load time, and recent studies show that even a 1 second delay in a page's load speed can result in more than 5% loss in conversion. The impact of correctly delivering your website's images to your viewers is staggering. Luckily, Cloudinary offers a simple way to upload your website's images to the cloud, automatically transform them according to your needs and deliver them optimized through a fast CDN employing industry best practices.