Cloudinary

Cloudinary takes away a lot of the muck that we need to manage images and creatives. Simplotel is like a Shopify for hotels and our hotel customers upload a large number of images and videos. We are able to leverage dynamic transformation of image and videos, resizing, quality parameter setting, format changing, cropping to provide an awesome experience to our customers. It saves us tons of development time and gives our customers a great experience.

We currently use Cloudinary to host image files on both our website and Help website. We love using the service and being able to utilize their API and make changes to images on the fly without having to go back and edit the image again. Also the ability overwrite an image if we need to change one is another great feature. We also host some CSS and video files there which is great that they do more than just images.

We are using Cloudinary for our Timeline feature. People post photos and videos, and we transform them to generate different variants for different device groups with better compression. It is used by the Engineering team in the server-side generation of photo/video variant generations. It helps us in optimizing the size of photos and making the user experience better. Network bandwidth gets reduced with it.

Cloudinary is being used by the product team to serve up all of the images for our website. On occasions, we also use it as a more general repository for files that need to be served up to clients. Properly handling and serving up Images can be one of the most time-consuming things a product can have, especially one that is more visually focused. There are many elements that need to be taken care of ranging from the size of the photos to their speedy delivery, which is made fairly effortless by Cloudinary.

Most high-quality stock images have dense resolutions which translate into large file sizes, which when used on a website can mean a major drag on performance as your users have to wait for their browser to pull them down. Cloudinary solves this problem for you by allowing you to host your images on their servers while you simply link to them from your site, and allowing your site to load far more quickly as a result. If that was all they did it would be a major help, but they take that hosting to the next level by offering a powerful API through which you can transform your images as they come down. Getting an image as a thumbnail, scaling it up or down, giving it a sepia filter, giving it a watercolor feel, all of it can be done on the fly by sending the right parameters through their API. I've never worked with anything else like it.

We use cloudinary on our own sites to speed up the delivery of images and video and automatically optimize them for end users browsers. We really like how it can optimize for quality as well as format to reduce the amount of development work we needed to do on the platform which meant that our dev team had less to do.