Cloudinary

Operating a website or app used to mean having to store all of your videos and images locally. While this was a reasonable option in the earlier days of the internet, when page images were limited and videos were a relative rarity, the increasing complexity of web design often requires multiple developers and designers juggling a whole host of images. Cloud sharing means that these designers and developers can work remotely, easily share page components among each other, and minimize the IT and R&D demands of your business. While cloud sharing services like DropBox can help developers to some degree, these services aren't built specifically to service the needs of designers and developers. Cloudinary is, and the love they've put into creating a useful and specialized interface is impressive. One of the strengths of the Cloudinary interface is how adaptive it is. Through the use of a proprietary API, you can connect your users directly to the cloud through their mobile apps and browsers, creating a unified experience where both your developers and users on the front end can manage uploads wherever they happen to be. Cloudinary offers an unlimited amount of storage for their users, and their cloud makes security a top priority. Your privacy is guaranteed, and Cloudinary automatically creates backups and archives changes to ensure that everything is protected even in the case of a catastrophe. Akami, Fastly, and CloudFront CDN serve the assets to ensure that uploads run at a lightning fast rate. Managers have a great degree of control over all of their assets through the back end dashboard. The Asset Administration interface puts all of your assets in one place and allows you to manage them easily and get instant access to a whole host of metrics regarding the performance of these assets. Administration can be accessed through dedicated software or via the intuitive API. Image and video manipulation tools are also packaged directly into the Cloudinary interface. From applying effects to cropping to resizing, you'll have all the basic tools you need to make sure that your images match the responsive design of your site or app, and Cloudinary has even incorporated facial recognition technology into their services. What separates Cloudinary from other less specialized cloud upload services is the wealth of tools designed to make the lives of developers easily. Automated URL based transformations allows you to take any image and morph it into a final product ready for immediate deployment on your site. Use facial recognition technology to automatically center your images, resize images according to your specific parameter, or let the Cloudinary system create thumbnails on the fly. Uploading images doesn't even require a server-side component. A simple line of code integrated into your site can automatically generate the tools necessary to upload images or videos on the user end of your application.

The pricing is vague to say the least. The service is shocking. I most certainly not use this. This kind of service is a long term investment for your site and you need to be able to trust. Very disappointing.