Overview
Image and video management are present in almost all of our projects. I would like to share my experience with this.
As a newbie developer, you think you are resolving a problem for the very first time and nobody faced it in the past. Now, as an experienced Engineer, I always ask myself “Someone else would have this problem before” and then I open a browser with Google. Seems obvious but ask that question is not always the first option for everyone.
Even though we are creating something that doesn’t exist yet, probably all the ways to that awesome implementations are a set of known problems.
That said, why should I worry about image and video management? Seems easy to upload an image to a server and display it on a beautiful page but problems come when we want to scale. So, my recommendation is to avoid image management in-house implementation as much as possible.
Cloudinary offers a good back office to manage our assets and an awesome API to integrate easily with our applications written in any language.
“Cloudinary is a cloud-based service that provides an end-to-end image and video management solution.”
You can create a free account and make some tests. I recommend you first upload some images and play around image manipulation through the URL and after that go ahead with some SDK.
1 – SDKs for many languages
Cloudinary provides SDKs for the most used languages making integration super easy.
2 – Image manipulation on the fly
Dynamic URLs to manipulate on the fly.
As easy as this URL:
https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/lady.jpg
There are several parameters to manipulate an image. I recommend you read more about in
Cloudinary documentation
3 – Awesome documentation
Cloudinary has awesome documentation that explains super clear how to configure your account, manipulate images, videos through URL or SDK.
4 – Nice delivery time
Cloudinary serves images from different CDNs; what it means that your users will see your assets from the nearest server based on geolocation. This way, latency is pretty small for most of the users.
Read more about Cloudinary CDN
5 – Image recognition and categorization
Cloudinary provides Artificial Intelligence for image recognition and categorization. This means that your image will be categorized automatically to be recognized later if you use the right parameters. Also, you will be able to provide your own tags to train your own assets.
This how the API responses after uploading an image with auto tag enabled.
{ "tag": "pink", "confidence": 0.822 },
{ "tag": "flower", "confidence": 0.6306 },
{ "tag": "flowers", "confidence": 0.3778 },
Read more about how to Cloudinary recognizes and categorizes your assets
Conclusion
Even if you just want to display images and/or videos in your site or mobile app without any kind of manipulation, you should think about third-party services to delegate that task. Also if you are making a Proof of Concept that includes images and/or videos you don’t need to implement assets uploading, you might take advantage of SDKs.
