The dominance of visual content on the Internet sets new tasks to developers. They need to find powerful solutions to increase search traffic by optimizing videos and images. Image optimization boosts the site loading speed and gives it an additional source of traffic.
The appropriately processed images and infographics can become an effective source of attracting visitors to the site. Uploadcare develops an innovative service that simplifies working with files on sites and applications. It is not only a highly specialized solution for working with all images but a full-fledged service for accepting files of any type from users, processing, and storing them in the cloud.
How does Uploadcare work?
Uploadcare delivers content to end-users via image CDN. It is a relatively new system of globally distributed servers that accelerates the delivery process. The system quickly analyzes from which device the user downloads the picture, its size, connection speed, and optimizes the picture, focusing on these parameters. If the user opens an image on the website on a laptop, then the image is optimized exactly for the laptop screen. If they open a picture on the phone, it adapts to the phone.
The key characteristics of Uploadcare
In simple words, through a special download widget, you can pick up files from any storage, process them directly in the widget window online and instantly publish them to the site.
· Acceptance of files from cloud storage and social networks (Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram);
· storage and delivery through one of the fastest CDNs in the world;
· very fast on-the-fly image processing;
· built-in data backup function;
· plugins for WordPress, CKEditor, TinyMCE;
· modules for most popular programming languages.
Uploadcare products
You can integrate one of these four products:
· File Uploader
Despite the advances in HTML5, uploading files to a server requires significant development effort. The download widget provides a simple, ready-to-use, stylish component for your website. It allows users to drag and drop or select files from their local file system, camera, URL, Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, Facebook, Instagram, Evernote, and Flickr directly to CDN Uploadcare (the list is constantly growing and you can also easily add custom source).
· Adaptive Delivery
CDN technology solves speed issues for sites with large images. It automatically converts images into modern formats with the minimum weight. CDN can be considered a second server that caches the site and serves requests through data centers that are close to the site visitors. As a result, your site data and thousands of images will reach the other part of the world in no time.
· Transformation
All images and files can be optimized according to multiple parameters such as size, color, contrast, format, and many more. Most of these changes can be done on the fly what considerably simplifies the use of the application.
Advantages of image optimization classes
Uploadcare allows you to modify all types of files in a way not to burden your content with excessive weight. There are several methods to optimize images.
Resizing and cropping
The size and crop manipulations can be made on the go by specifying parameters you want to amend.
The image is resized by default to 2048×2048 pixels or you can state the desirable resolution:
/resize/:one_or_two_dimensions/
You can change the size of one linear dimension only.
There is a possibility to set additional resize parameters:
-/stretch/:mode/
Three modes are available:
· on — this option will stretch an image up.
· off — it prevents any image dimension from stretching over any of its axes.
· fill — no stretching happens in this case, only a colored frame is added, the color is set by default.
You can specify cropping parameters as well:
-/crop/:two_dimensions/
-/crop/:two_dimensions/:two_coords/
-/crop/:two_dimensions/center/
Without this information, the top-left image edge will be cropped by default.
Available crop scaling parameters:
-/scale_crop/:two_dimensions/
-/scale_crop/:two_dimensions/:type/
-/scale_crop/:two_dimensions/:offsets/
-/scale_crop/:two_dimensions/:type/:offsets/
You can apply smart cropping to avoid any distortion to your image. Smart cropping analyzes all faces, objects, and corner points on the image. The algorithm works in the following sequence – faces-objects-points. If nothing is specified, the program works according to: offset setting or applies centre-cropping.
Compression
When optimizing the image weight, the main task is to avoid its distortion. The right combination of format and quality is the key to better SEO ranking.
Format option -/format/:format/allows you to work with JPEG, PNG, WebP, or auto-format of the image. The auto-format is always associated with WebP files if they are supported.
You may select several quality levels of the processed image:
-/quality/:value/
The proposed values are: normal, better, best, lighter, lightest, smart.
The paid subscription opens access to GIF to video conversion:
/:uuid/gif2video/
Video files are much faster. You will receive an MP4 or WebM file after processing.
Colors
This feature will allow you to adjust several color details:
-/brightness/:value/
-/exposure/:value/
-/gamma/:value/
-/contrast/:value/
-/saturation/:value/
-/vibrance/:value/
-/warmth/:value/
You can choose the value parameter from 0 to 100 for all positions or only for a few of them. Besides, there are additional tools. You can enhance the image, apply grayscale, invert it, and add various filters.
Contrasts
The images can be blurred
-/blur/
-/blur/:strength/
or sharpened:
-/sharp/
-/sharp/:strength/
It is possible to apply these effects only to an object or face on the photo.
Overlay
This feature allows arranging several images in a layered way.
-/overlay/:uuid/
-/overlay/:uuid/:relative_dimensions/:relative_coordinates/:opacity/
The use of translucent images is a good solution to prevent unauthorized use of your images. There are several layering parameters to choose from.
Rotating and flipping
With Uploadcare you can easily rotate or flip images.
Rotation can be automatic or EXIF-based:
-/autorotate/yes/
-/autorotate/no/
You can also process images to get flip or mirror results.
Video encoding
This feature works via REST API. It improves video quality, format, and size.
You need to send a request for video processing, provide the file and wait until it is finished. All encoded videos become accessible via a CDN URL. Video transformation does not happen instantly. You need to place a request for this job alongside the following information:
· /:uuid/video/, UUIDs the files you need to process and desirable parameters.
· store, a notification if Uploadcare should save the results.
It is possible to indicate what you want to change in your video files by adding the desirable features. Video transformation will ensure that your content is correctly displayed on all types of devices.
File conversion
Uploadcare can work with all types of text documents.
This operation is realized via REST API https://api.uploadcare.com/convert/document/
It needs a preliminary request and some time to be processed.
You can easily evaluate all the benefits of Uploadcare Image Optimization by testing a demo version of the application.