Item: Cloudinary
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudinary

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Automatically optimizes the images format to support user's browser - e.g. Chrome users get WebP formats
Automatically optimizes for quality so you can set up a flag to automatically optimize the quality
Cool additional things like face detection, or integrating with other APIs are simple - like adding flags to the URL

Cons

Currently, they don't have an officially supported Drupal module -so it's quite painful to implement.
If you have a site that has a lot of visitors then it's possible to get quite large bills out of the blue if you get a massive spike e.g. black Friday.
The UI for the backend and documentation could do with a lot of improvements.

Return on Investment

Faster speed on our website
Larger images as a result of us designing for this faster speed
Site looks better!

Alternatives Considered

ImgIx and CloudFlare

Cloudinary seemed to be the most sophisticated with the most documentation and platform support. Other solutions seemed to be a lot harder to implement, however, due to the good documentation and API samples on their GitHub we were able to implement it nicely. Additionally, they have a lot of really well-known brands using them like Wired, Sky News, and eBay which gave us a lot of confidence that this was a good robust solution to use and to help others with.

Other Software Used

JIRA Software, Asana, Google Analytics, Google Drive, Google BigQuery, Facebook for Business

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have an out of the box solution where you can easily manipulate the URLs to add in cloudinary - then it works like a dream. They have built-in support for platforms like Magento and wordpress which means that it can be a case of just downloading and installing. For other platforms like drupal it can be a massive headache to implement and get working fast. There is also SEO that needs to be considered when adopting Cloudinary and a poor implementation can cost your Organic visits!

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Simple Image Optimization