A couple of months ago while taking a break from implementing cool new features like q_auto and g_auto, I was joking in our team chat about how well various image formats “compress” one-pixel images. In response, Orly — who runs the blog — asked me if I’d write a post about single-pixel images. I said: "Sure, why not. But it will be a very short blog post. After all, there’s not much you can say about a single pixel."
Looks like I was wrong. Very wrong.
Every image is unique and every one of your website visitors is different. In a perfect world, we'd like to adapt each image individually to be "just right" for every user. With "just right" being perfectly cropped, using responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings and optimal quality with the best image format.
As a developer, you want to allow your users to download multiple files in a single click. An easy way to download multiple files and share them is to generate a ZIP file. When images are involved, you may also want to normalize the original images before including them in the ZIP file, by scaling them down to the same maximum resolution or converting them to the same format.
If you make a copy of a copy of a copy, the quality will deteriorate with every ‘generation’. This problem is called ‘generation loss’. It is not difficult to understand why this happens with actual copier machines. Scanning and printing are not perfect, being based on noisy sensors and physical paper and ink, and the resulting noise will tend to accumulate.
It's great to have the capability to manipulate images on the fly by using dynamic URLs to customize the images to fit the graphic design of your site or mobile application. However, what if you want to manipulate an image depending on a specific image characteristic (like its width or aspect ratio) or its contents (does it contain a face?). What you need is a way to apply a transformation to an image only if a specific condition is met. Take for example a situation where you have allocated space on your page for a user uploaded image with a width and height of 200 pixels. Furthermore, if the image contains a face you would like to zoom in and focus on the face itself, otherwise you would like to fit the entire image into the available space:
Many of the photos displayed on the internet these days are of people. If your website or mobile application displays photos that include people, you will want to make sure that their faces are included in the delivered images when cropping and manipulating them to fit your graphic design and responsive layout. You may even want to further manipulate an image according to the faces present, for example, adding a harlequin mask overlay on all of their eyes, where each mask is adjusted to the correct size and orientation (although not a typical use case, it's a cool example of using advanced facial attribute detection):
Perhaps some of you readers that have been around for a while remember our add-ons launch 2 years back, when we introduced a number of third party image processing products, fully integrated into the Cloudinary image management pipeline. Since then our add-ons marketplace has grown, both in our offerings and in usage. We now have 11 add-ons offering various capabilities and improvements.
Cloudinary’s JavaScript library accelerates web development by providing automated image manipulation and management with a few lines of code. The newly released version streamlines the library by providing a much requested jQuery-free core library. At the same time it is fully backward compatible with previous versions. The new library is further enhanced with classes and a chainable API, making the implementation of Cloudinary functionality in your application easier (and more enjoyable!).
If you have a web site or mobile application, chances are you need to deliver a lot of media resources, especially images, to your users. How would you know if all your images were delivered correctly to your users and if there were no broken images displayed on your website? Maybe you build image URLs based on a certain naming convention and you end up with URLs that point to non-existing images, which result in HTTP status errors and broken images? Maybe search engines like Google have indexed the URLs of your images that were subsequently deleted or modified, and these URLs now generate errors when accessed?
This is a guest post by Eric Portis – a proud member of (and newsletter-writer for) the Responsive Issues Community Group. The RICG formulated, championed, and standardized the new HTML features presented in the article.
The number of different devices available and their potential screen resolutions keep increasing, and to support this wide range of resolutions and devices, responsive website design is now the standard. A website's markup must adapt itself to look perfect on all the different devices and in various resolutions, pixel densities and mobile device orientations. Managing, manipulating and delivering images, is one of the main challenges of responsive design that web developers face.
Are you delivering your site via HTTPS or considering it? You're not alone - in 2015 the number of sites running on HTTPS almost doubled. Both consumers and web developers are now much more aware of the value of the humble green lock displayed in the address bar. The benefits of using HTTPS extend beyond the customer’s safety, to SEO boosts, and advanced functionalities that are only available when delivering via HTTPS, such as HTTP/2 and WebRTC.
This is a guest post by Kasia Kramnik, Content Marketing Manager at Netguru, a full stack development house and one of Cloudinary's Consulting partners.
Take a look at your website. Are you happy with the way it looks? I bet you are, and that’s really awesome. Keep in mind though, there is one thing you can’t actually see, but you need to experience: the load speed. Sometimes the most important element is invisible to the eye. In this article you’ll find tips on perfecting the invisible as well: loading your site and media with visibly better results.
