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Cloudinary Further Simplifies Web Design Complexities with Fully Automated Content- and Context-Aware Image Adaptation
[June 22, 2016]

Cloudinary Further Simplifies Web Design Complexities with Fully Automated Content- and Context-Aware Image Adaptation


Cloudinary today announced enhancements to its image management solution that eliminate the complexities of delivering the best image to each user, while automatically adjusting for each individual device, resolution, image content and graphic design layout. With its new content- and context-aware image adaptation capabilities, Cloudinary now has fully automated the previously complex and time-consuming tasks of cropping, adjusting quality, determining responsive breakpoints and selecting the proper format and encoder settings on an image-by-image basis.

Cloudinary has long been known for simplifying image management, it still required some manual processes, such as identifying the cropping parameters, encoding settings and various resolutions for responsive images before the images could be dynamically adapted. Today's enhancements now enable full automation, allowing users to upload a single high-resolution copy of each image, which is automatically adapted in real-time - without any manual intervention - to focus on the most important region of the image, at the optimal quality and encoder settings, and responsively delivered on any device, at any resolution.

"Adapting an image to fit the graphic design on various devices and browsers, while optimizing performance, is both an art and science. Perfecting the image for every possible scenario can be a laborious process, and oftentimes is not feasible given time and manpower constraints, particularly when they must scale these efforts across thousands of images, or more, for a single site," said Itai Lahan, co-founder and CEO at Cloudinary. "By providing full automation, Cloudinary is taking all of the guesswork and manual intervention out of the process, freeing web developers and graphic designers to focus on their core product."

The new auomated features of Cloudinary include:



  • Automatic Content-Aware (News - Alert) Cropping - For responsive design, simply scaling an image up or down isn't always enough. Images often require cropping to fit diverse device layouts, resolutions and aspect ratios, while maximizing the visibility of important areas within the image. Cloudinary supports automatic art direction, leveraging new content-aware cropping algorithms to detect the region of interest in every image and then crop them on the fly using dynamic URLs to fit the graphic design and layout, on any device, without losing focus on important content.
  • Intelligent Content-Aware Encoding - Developers and designers tend to refrain from experimenting with image quality adjustments for fear of degrading the image. However, the quality compression level doesn't always lead to a loss of visual quality. Precise adjustment of compression level complemented by fine-tuning of encoding settings can significantly reduce the file size without any noticeable degradation. Cloudinary automates the file size versus quality trade-off decision by analyzing every image to find the best quality compression level and optimal encoder and encoder settings based on the image content and the viewing browser. By doing so, Cloudinary can produce an image that looks fine to the naked eye, while minimizing the file size.
  • Dynamic Format Selection - Developers are expected to select optimal image formats - such as JPEG, PNG (8, 24, 32), WebP or JPEG-XR - for different scenarios based on the image content and viewing device/browser, in an effort to minimize page load time and bandwidth usage. But manually adapting the format for many images can be complex and inefficient. Cloudinary optimizes image delivery by dynamically selecting the most efficient format, based on the image's unique content and viewing browser, and converts the image to this format, in real time.
  • Automatic Responsive Images - Responsive images adapt to fit each individual user's device and browser, providing huge gains in performance and an improved user experience. But generating, managing and marking up multiple alternate formats, resolutions, and crops of images is tedious. Cloudinary can now determine the layout width of an image on a user's device and the density of their screen, then decide how big of an image that user will need, and select and deliver an optimal resource - all at the CDN level. Alternate, re-sized versions of images are generated with the help of Cloudinary's Responsive Images Breakpoint algorithms. These breakpoints ensure that the set of available resources has sensible gaps in file size and resolution, calculated on an image-by-image basis to limit the number of image variations and reduce file sizes. These alternate versions are cached on the CDN and selected-from on the fly - all from a single URL.

To learn more about Cloudinary's new automated features, click here.

About Cloudinary


Cloudinary provides a comprehensive cloud-based image and video management solution. With offices in Israel and Palo Alto (News - Alert), Calif., Cloudinary has quickly become the de facto solution used by web and mobile application developers at companies around the world to streamline image and video management, and deliver an optimal end user experience. Among Cloudinary users are Answers.com (News - Alert), Buzzfeed, Virgin, The Knot, Under Armour, Vogue, Whole Foods, Wired and many others. For more information, visit www.cloudinary.com or follow on Twitter (News - Alert) @cloudinary.


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