Many websites and mobile applications support user uploaded images and other files. This requires a service to receive and process the uploads, store them safely, manipulate them to match the website or app’s design, and deliver them to your users. This also requires a user interface within your site or app that allows users to easily upload images.
Many websites and mobile applications with user generated content allow you to upload all kinds of files. Images, PDFs, and Microsoft Office files, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are all common types of uploads.
Sites and apps are including more and more high-quality images. The more you can compress images to reduce their size in bytes, the smaller your bandwidth, the faster your site will load and the happier your users will be. But when compressing images, you need to make sure you maintain high visual quality.
Short animated GIF-based video sequences seem to be spreading like wildfire around the web.
Media and news sites display short video segments, social apps allow their users to share animated GIFs with their friends, and while the dated animated GIF format is very useful for this purpose, it has one significant disadvantage - its huge file size.
Web development was much simpler only a few years ago, when we were building HTML pages that included images and photos, and all elements shared the same resolution units. If for example, you aimed at a standard 1024x768 screen, you knew these were exactly the number of pixels available for displaying HTML elements and images.
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.
Handling user uploaded images on your website can be a time consuming task. In this post, we'll show how Cloudinary's cloud-based image management service can help you turn user uploading into a lightweight operation that bypasses your servers altogether.
Cloudinary is passionate about its users. We built our cloud-based image management features around real-world pain points, and it's gratifying to see our customers use those features to solve major business challenges.
How do you crop an image to a custom shape? How do you add a shadow effect to an image with transparency? How do you add text overlay to an image without using HTML?
If you build or maintain a website with a lot of images, you've probably had many questions like these. Most developers who work with images have scripts or tools that can achieve dozens if not hundreds of image manipulations - from basics like crop and resize, to advanced stuff like shadow and transparency, watermarks, face detection, etc. But how do you mix and match these manipulations correctly to solve a problem or achieve a certain effect?
Fashion isn't something you'd expect to repeat itself in the technology world - technology advances quickly and hardly ever circles back. But where animated GIFs are involved, it seems like the 90s are here again. Animated GIFs are everywhere, and not only on strange, cheezy web sites - they've become mainstream. You now see short videos shared and played as animated GIFs in reputed sites such as Gawker and TechCrunch.
There are many options to consider when allowing a user to upload an image to your website or mobile app. You might wish to limit the size and format of the uploaded images. You may want to apply specific manipulations to the images, such as cropping, resizing and adapting the image to your site's look & feel. Beyond that, it's common to create a variety of thumbnails from a newly uploaded image.
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.
Our customers frequently ask us if we can help them apply dynamic text overlays over images. While a common approach is to add text elements in your pages using HTML elements, CSS or native mobile UI controls, in many cases it's preferable to create images with text layers already included. It makes it simpler to display rich content on different media channels and devices, while ensuring a pixel-perfect result as your graphic designer envisioned.
Many websites and mobile apps today allow their visitors to share their own photos. Users upload their profile images to dating sites, photos of their personal belongings to second hand market websites and real estate billboards. Users share their personal photos on social networks, and upload images to their favorite e-commerce websites, showcasing and reviewing their latest purchases.
It’s a common challenge in many mobile and web applications: how do you allow users to upload their own images, while automatically adapting these images to a fixed graphic design?
A classic example is a user uploading a profile picture, but instead of providing a headshot (which is what we really need from them), they upload a picture of their entire body with additional objects in the background. Obviously this image will need to be cropped to the size of the profile picture, while focusing on the user’s face.
