Manipulating images for your website is such a tedious chore. You need to open Photoshop, click your mouse about ten thousand times, then save the file and upload it. Then next month you redesign your site and suddenly need to re-size all your image elements again! Startup Cloudinary has a good alternative for you: use custom URLs to transform your images in the cloud! I was a bit skeptical when I first read about Cloudinary, but after five minutes of goofing around with it I’m sold.
Upload your images — either through the Cloudinary dashboard or from your own applications via their API — and then access those images using specially crafted URLs to apply a variety of transformations to your images. That’s the real magic: you don’t need to do anything other than request your image with the transformations you want. Your original photo is still available, if needed, and each new variant you request is cached and delivered through Amazon’s CDN.
You want that full-size image scaled to 100 pixels high? Here you go!
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/h_100,c_thumb/butterfly.jpg
Oh, you just want the woman’s face from that photo in a nice 90×90 thumbnail? Cloudinary provides face detection, so no problem.
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face/butterfly.jpg
You need rounded corners?
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_20/butterfly.jpg
Or how about a circle?
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max/butterfly.jpg
Users can create named transformations in their dashboard, which can then be used in the URLs for convenience and clarity. “round_thumbnail” makes a better URL component than “w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max”, wouldn’t you agree?
Cloudinary can also trivially grab profile photos from Facebook and Twitter:
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/facebook/scottmerrill
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/twitter_name/smerrill
And all the various transformations can be applied to these images, as well.
Cloudinary offers a robust and well-documented API. Pricing plans look reasonable, and they have a free tier for low-volume or proof-of-concept users. Now you can quit mucking around with Photoshop and get back to agonizing over which font to use for your blog about ancient Egyptian cat worship.
