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Cloudinary

An end-to-end image & video management solution for your web and mobile applications
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What is Cloudinary?

Cloudinary is a cloud-based service that streamlines websites and mobile applications' entire image and video management needs - uploads, storage, administration, manipulations, and delivery.
Cloudinary is a tool in the Image Processing and Management category of a tech stack.

Who uses Cloudinary?

Companies
183 companies reportedly use Cloudinary in their tech stacks, including Glovo, ebay, and Fiverr.

Developers
381 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Cloudinary.

Cloudinary Integrations

Python, Node.js, jQuery, Java, and PHP are some of the popular tools that integrate with Cloudinary. Here's a list of all 39 tools that integrate with Cloudinary.
Pros of Cloudinary
37
Easy setup
31
Fast image delivery
26
Vast array of image manipulation capabilities
21
Free tier
11
Heroku add-on
9
Reduce development costs
7
Amazing support
6
Heroku plugin
6
Great libraries for all languages
6
Virtually limitless scale
5
Easy to integrate with Rails
4
Cheap
3
Shot setup time
3
Very easy setup
2
Solves alot of image problems.
1
Best in the market and includes free plan
1
Extremely generous free pricing tier
0
Fast image delivery, vast array
Decisions about Cloudinary

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Cloudinary in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
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We are currently on Cloudinary but are looking at alternatives. We've recently enhanced our e-store with upgrades on functionality in order to stay competitive in the e-comm space.

The current key focus is to increase sales volume by driving more traffic and sales conversions on our e-store, But the skyrocketing cost of the Cloudinary monthly subscription is holding us back. We needed to take the moment to review the scalability of our current setup.

We are even currently afraid to work on advertising campaigns online because we are afraid of that:

  • The e-store takes too long to load
  • Skyrocketing costs on Cloudinary when more visitors are on our pages.

Summary Overview (on what we want to achieve):

  • Keep the cost sustainable
  • Scalability - manage and control costs
  • Specifications that cannot be compromised - high res images, acceptable time to load, etc.

What is the baseline and how can we measure them accurately? (A new user in incognito and not fetching from local browser caches, etc)

Findings:

  • Assets: 2500 images on average per month
  • Image Size: 2500x3500 (orginal) which is compressed into 900x1260
  • Bandwidth: May-Oct traffic numbers (100k Total). 20k per month
  • Location: 80% of the traffic is local traffic
  • Does the internal traffic impact on the CDN usage? Our internal team has been accessing and updating the live site a lot.
  • Measurements - scientific way to measure the differences between the solutions offered TTFB, FCP measurement
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Shared insights
at

Repost

Overview: To put it simply, we plan to use the MERN stack to build our web application. MongoDB will be used as our primary database. We will use ExpressJS alongside Node.js to set up our API endpoints. Additionally, we plan to use React to build our SPA on the client side and use Redis on the server side as our primary caching solution. Initially, while working on the project, we plan to deploy our server and client both on Heroku . However, Heroku is very limited and we will need the benefits of an Infrastructure as a Service so we will use Amazon EC2 to later deploy our final version of the application.

Serverside: nodemon will allow us to automatically restart a running instance of our node app when files changes take place. We decided to use MongoDB because it is a non relational database which uses the Document Object Model. This allows a lot of flexibility as compared to a RDMS like SQL which requires a very structural model of data that does not change too much. Another strength of MongoDB is its ease in scalability. We will use Mongoose along side MongoDB to model our application data. Additionally, we will host our MongoDB cluster remotely on MongoDB Atlas. Bcrypt will be used to encrypt user passwords that will be stored in the DB. This is to avoid the risks of storing plain text passwords. Moreover, we will use Cloudinary to store images uploaded by the user. We will also use the Twilio SendGrid API to enable automated emails sent by our application. To protect private API endpoints, we will use JSON Web Token and Passport. Also, PayPal will be used as a payment gateway to accept payments from users.

Client Side: As mentioned earlier, we will use React to build our SPA. React uses a virtual DOM which is very efficient in rendering a page. Also React will allow us to reuse components. Furthermore, it is very popular and there is a large community that uses React so it can be helpful if we run into issues. We also plan to make a cross platform mobile application later and using React will allow us to reuse a lot of our code with React Native. Redux will be used to manage state. Redux works great with React and will help us manage a global state in the app and avoid the complications of each component having its own state. Additionally, we will use Bootstrap components and custom CSS to style our app.

Other: Git will be used for version control. During the later stages of our project, we will use Google Analytics to collect useful data regarding user interactions. Moreover, Slack will be our primary communication tool. Also, we will use Visual Studio Code as our primary code editor because it is very light weight and has a wide variety of extensions that will boost productivity. Postman will be used to interact with and debug our API endpoints.

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Cloudinary's Features

  • Upload images to a cloud-based storage
  • Upload video to cloud-based storage
  • Automatic backup and revision tracking
  • Many image manipulation capabilities & effects
  • Smart resizing & face detection based thumbnails
  • Handling PDFs, sprites, watermarks, social profile pictures
  • Fast CDN delivery with advanced caching
  • Automatic image optimization
  • Powerful dashboard, media library and reports
  • RESTful APIs, intuitive URL based transformations
  • Image metadata and semantic data extraction
  • Integration SDKs for web & mobile frameworks
  • Custom domain (CNAME) support
  • Authenticated URLs
  • On-the-fly Video transcoding
  • On-the-fly Video overlays

Cloudinary Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Cloudinary?
Bytescale
Bytescale is the best way to serve images, videos, and audio for web apps. Includes: Fast CDN, Storage, and Media Processing APIs.
CloudFlare
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
imgix
imgix is the leading platform for end-to-end visual media processing. With robust APIs, SDKs, and integrations, imgix empowers developers to optimize, transform, manage, and deliver images and videos at scale through simple URL parameters.
Akamai
If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
See all alternatives

Cloudinary's Followers
594 developers follow Cloudinary to keep up with related blogs and decisions.