Thrillophilia, India's largest online tours and activities platform, faced a significant challenge in managing and delivering millions of images. The platform supports over 1 million images, with 250,000+ unique images distributed across 200,000 pages for the 10,000 tours and activities offered on the site. However, many of these images, uploaded by Thrillophilia’s suppliers, lacked visual appeal as they were taken by cell phones or low-end cameras. Additionally, with more than 1,000 new images being uploaded to the site each day, Thrillophilia developers found themselves having to focus on image transformation and management, instead of their core duties.

GUESS was relying on Adobe Scene7 to manage images for its online store. However, Scene7, a Flash-reliant product, made workflows and modern technology updates more challenging. With modern browsers phasing out Flash, GUESS developers struggled to deliver the high-quality web experience it wanted to offer customers. The system being used by GUESS was so volatile that it created regular bottlenecks. Image uploads would fail, photo editors would have to crop photos with extra white space to ensure they’d appear appropriately on the site. Sometimes images wouldn’t look as crisp and high-fidelity as the original once they rendered on the web. These challenges weren’t just a big deal for the development team. They frustrated potential customers as well. Heavier images meant slower page load times, and unnecessary bandwidth usage by visitors.

Creative and marketing teams often face challenges in managing digital assets across multiple channels. The process of tagging, cataloging, resizing, and downloading and reuploading rich media assets for optimal distribution can be time-consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, these teams often have to search, download, and license stock assets on a separate website, then save the chosen assets to their computers or to a cloud storage solution like Google Drive, DropBox, and Box. In order for these assets to be available in their DAM system for other team members, each asset along with its metadata needs to be individually uploaded.

James Hardie’s Australia services many customers through its network including the likes of hardware stores, builders, property developers and architects, as well as connecting directly with consumers. Consequently, it has a large and complex network of sales and marketing teams dedicated to serving the varied needs of these disparate audiences. The one thing that unites all James Hardie Australia partners and customers is the need for high quality, constantly updated imagery and other marketing content showcasing the company’s products and usage in building projects. From a consumer and brand perspective, it’s crucial that the company’s online channels are kept up to date with all the latest interior and exterior design trends. For trade audiences in particular, an engaging and innovative product portfolio is a must. Often, the company would have multiple photo shoots taking place at various locations, with no central repository for all the images nor any shared filing system or naming convention. The marketing team would regularly be tasked with finding images featuring a certain product and spend hours manually searching through disparate folders to find them.

As a digital-first lifestyle brand, MADE.COM’s customer journey begins and ends online. While shoppers can visit one of MADE’s seven showrooms in the UK and Mainland Europe to experience its furniture and homewares in person, they still need to make the final purchase through the brand’s website. Showcasing products stylishly through strong lifestyle photography is one of MADE’s strengths. However, as the company grew, some of the original decisions about things like how to orient and size images became out of date. Product listing pages couldn’t show highresolution images, due to pixelation. It became difficult to upload assets in multiple sizes. The MADE team decided to address these issues in March 2020, as well as ensure the mobile version of the website—fast rising in importance as an acquisition channel—was fully optimized: critical, as mobile is now more than half of all MADE traffic.

Answers.com, a popular website for sharing knowledge, faced a significant challenge in managing the vast volume of image uploads. The engineering team was tasked with storing these images, applying various graphic modifications, and delivering them to end-users in an optimal and quick manner. These tasks were complex and time-consuming. As the company expanded, the business needs grew, requiring a robust, scalable system for their image capabilities. The existing system needed re-engineering to support the scale, and the team was in search of a better solution to facilitate their work with images. They were looking for a partner to help expedite the process while meeting their evolving image requirements. The rapid growth of content and images added to the site necessitated a solid, scalable solution that was also cost-effective.

ClickMechanic, an online marketplace for automobile mechanics based in London, was facing challenges with managing and optimizing their media assets. As an online business, it was crucial for them to ensure that images loaded quickly on their website. They wanted to serve their images as quickly as possible through a content delivery network (CDN), but were apprehensive about the complexities of setup and integration. The company needed a solution that could not only meet their current needs but also scale with their growing business. They were also looking for a solution that could handle a large number of photos, some of which were several megabytes in size, and display them efficiently on their website.

Keep.com, an innovative online commerce startup, was facing a significant challenge in managing image transformations for their website and mobile app. The application displays hundreds of thousands of product and brand images, user profile pictures, and user uploaded images. Each time a redesign took place, Keep needed new image sizes, which required reprocessing of all the images. This process was not only time-consuming from a server perspective but also caused delays in the development process due to long waiting times as all the images were being transformed. Engineering resources were wasted trying to set up new image transformations and getting jobs running efficiently. Despite these efforts, image processing remained a bottleneck, hindering the development of their website and business.

MyCreativeShop, a company specializing in product customization for print designs, faced a significant challenge in providing their customers with realistic previews of their designs. Customers found it difficult to visualize what their designs would look like once printed, as the company was only able to provide flat, static images of the finished designs. The company explored various solutions, including Photoshop alternatives and running ImageMagick on their server, but these options were not scalable and involved complex task management.

Sendify, a logistics company based in Sweden, was in the process of building two new websites to implement new brand guidelines and improve site structures. The company wanted to incorporate images on both websites to enhance the user experience. However, managing these image assets posed a significant challenge. Images were stored in various locations, including local files on computers and different folders on Google Drive. This disorganized storage system led to developers spending up to ten minutes searching for a single image. Additionally, any transformation to the images, even minor ones, required the involvement of a graphic designer. With hundreds of images and multiple transformations for each, this process was time-consuming and hindered the daily progress on the websites.