Cloudinary Blog

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.

As the end of 2015 approaches, we wanted to share a quick summary of Cloudinary’s accomplishment this year and some of our plans for next year. We couldn't possibly do this without including an image manipulation example! That's our hat trick in the title :-)

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.

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 e-commerce 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?

Last month I was invited to speak at Daho.am, Munich's developers conference. This conference was organized by Stylight, a very successful fashion technology startup.  Stylight signed up for a free Cloudinary account about 3 years ago and similarly to Cloudinary back then, Stylight were quite a young startup. Since then both companies have grown impressively together and Stylight are now a premium customer of Cloudinary, managing hundreds of millions of images.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. For modern websites, a video surely takes the visual impact to a whole new level.

Nowadays, people enjoy the amazing capability of shooting videos with smartphone cameras that easily fit in their back pockets and are accessible nearly everywhere. Modern web applications have an opportunity to dramatically increase their visual impact by showcasing these videos online. Between news reports, user shared video snippets, explainer videos and ad campaigns, we see more and more videos appearing daily in our visited websites.

Rails is a great web development framework that was recently considered the coolest framework around. While other frameworks have gained popularity over time, Rails remains one of the most popular web development frameworks to date..

Red eye often happens due to the use of flash in low light conditions as the light hits the eye very quickly and into the retina. It then bounces off of the back of the eye and emits a red color due to the blood vessels there. Although more professional modern cameras and flashes generally prevent this from happening, red eye may still occur with simpler, smaller cameras (including smartphones). There are various software solutions for red eye removal available on mobile devices and desktops, some of which require manual processing to get good results.

Social networking sites allow users to upload images or other types of files that are immediately available to other users via news feeds or notifications. In some cases, attackers can directly spread infected files, but more commonly, they leverage the viral effect and the fact that users are simply unaware that their files are infected through sharing and collaborating with others. As a site owner or application developer, it is your responsibility to protect users and prevent these situations from occurring. Fortunately, Cloudinary makes this easier with its Metascan add-on.