Cloudinary

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.

Deporvillage, Spain’s top online sports retailer, was facing challenges in managing its website which features multiple images of the more than 8,000 seasonal products it offered. The company’s engineering team bore the cost of using Amazon S3 to store and serve a growing number of product images. They needed to ensure all images were responsive and optimized for size and speed, since mobile devices accounted for about 70% of its web traffic, and about 55% of all conversion was mobile. The company managed its website in six different languages and were needed to constantly add or remove images for high-turnover to items, or to address seasonal promotions.

Reformation, a Los Angeles-based fashion brand, primarily focuses on eCommerce, with more than half of their customers visiting its website using mobile devices. The company was using an out-of-the-box, built-in functionality included with Workarea, its eCommerce platform. It leveraged Dragonfly, a customizable RubyGem, to generate thumbnails in Ruby on Rails. However, this solution was causing issues as it required every website visitor to download the same image at the same resolution. This either caused issues with the quality of brand and product images on high-resolution screens or required unnecessary bandwidth use by the customer, depending on the platform or device they were using to access the site. Additionally, the company was experimenting with video on the site, integrating clips via Vimeo. However, the performance was choppy and not the quality experience it hoped to deliver to visitors.

Under Armour, a global leader in performance footwear, apparel, and equipment, was looking to extend its brand through the Under Armour Connected Fitness™ platform. This platform powers the world’s largest digital health and fitness community through a suite of applications: UA Record, MapMyFitness, Endomondo, and MyFitnessPal. As Under Armour was creating UA Record, developers began looking for a solution that would enable it to host a large quantity of images and video, and simplify image sizing and transformation. The company’s various fitness apps – which encourage professional athletes and weekend warriors to share images and other details of their workouts – have more than 150 million registered users. Developers researched various solutions that could meet their needs.

The Hub, an online marketplace that connects brands with creators, was facing a challenge with the storage and resizing of large image and video files uploaded by creators to their personal portfolios on the platform. The Hub needed as many as 10 unique size and aspect combinations for each uploaded primary image, which was a time-consuming process that burdened its team of front-end developers. The two options they had were either to restrict the creative community to abide by a maximum pixel size and file size or to allow creatives to upload large files and then manually downsize them to the largest resolution needed. Both options were not ideal as they either limited the creative community or burdened the Hub's team.

Moviepilot Inc., a media company that hosts a website and social publishing platform for movie and TV fans, was facing challenges with its infrastructure. The company was initially running its platform on hardware in Berlin, but with a site tailored to a U.S.-based audience, it needed to rely on content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce latency and deliver an optimal user experience. The company was spending significant resources on ensuring that images worked properly on the Moviepilot platform, which was taking focus away from its core business.

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.

Bleacher Report was seeking a way to further enhance its content offerings by delivering short video highlights while games were still in progress. But with nearly 85 percent of users accessing Bleacher Report content on mobile devices, the company needed to ensure that short video highlights could be created quickly and streamed flawlessly, regardless of the viewing device or bandwidth. Delivering video content to users across different devices is not a trivial task. To do so, Bleacher Report would have to manipulate and optimize each video to suit every viewing device, viewport and bandwidth.

lastminute.com, a leading European online travel and leisure retailer, faced the challenge of managing over 120,000 images across multiple teams and repositories. The company had been using Cloudinary for specific use cases, such as hotel images, managed by tech teams. In parallel, a team dedicated to manual asset management, using a different DAM provider for editorial purposes. Another challenge was the time-consuming task of modifying images for new campaigns. This process could take weeks, limiting lastminute.com’s ability to quickly launch new campaigns that would let vacationers capitalize on limited-time deals.

Hipcamp, a website that allows campers to discover great destinations, faced challenges in managing thousands of images of varying quality, size, and format, uploaded by campers and property owners. Developers had to individually reformat, crop and resize each photo to meet Hipcamp’s quality standards. To ensure these images appeared correctly, regardless of how the visitors were viewing them, developers had to make multiple versions of images, designed specifically for desktops, tablets, or phone viewing. But with a team of only 11 engineers, who work on the full stack, managing images could be a full time job, leaving them less time to focus on continually innovating the company’s offerings to its users.

Bloomsbury Publishing's Academic division embarked on an ambitious project to digitize encyclopedias, studies, and images from museum and private collections, as well as archive ancient manuscripts and very old printed books. The finished digital products would then be offered for sale to universities and other academic organizations, who would make the content available to all students and staff for research and educational purposes. The images of these books, manuscripts, and museum collections would be used as thumbnails for search results, merged into books view so users could digitally turn the pages, and zoom in and out. Also all products needed to be responsive, since visitors would access the content from both mobile devices and laptops. Another critical requirement was strong, yet flexible, security. Some images would be freely available to the public as part of its marketing efforts, while those that were part of published content — inside books, encyclopedias, and collections of museum objects — needed to be restricted so that only purchasers and authorized users could access the content.

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.

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.

StubHub, the world’s largest ticket marketplace, was facing challenges as it evolved from a lightweight website to one that was rich with images, videos and custom views from seat locations at event venues around the world. The company needed a way to streamline image management, ensuring that the key focal points of each image were viewable in more than 30 viewports across a multitude of devices. Additionally, StubHub had to address digital asset management, since it worked with licensed content from partners and often had requests by third-party marketers to use the site’s images. The company also had to contend with the sheer scale of managing more than 120,000 active events on the site at any given time, and between 800 and 1,200 new ones being published every day. StubHub’s catalog included more than 54,000 entities with multiple images that needed to be selected, edited and updated continually.

VELTRA, a leading online travel experience marketplace in Japan, was faced with the challenge of optimizing cost expenditure when web traffic dropped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's website relies heavily on attractive images of travel destinations, which directly influences users' likelihood of signing up for its services. The pages also need to be highly responsive to prevent users from leaving the site. Previously, VELTRA used an in-house image optimization tool and then switched to a tool offered by their Content Delivery Network (CDN) service company. However, the fixed monthly fees of this service increased as the number of visitors and processes to the web service grew, leading to high costs during off-peak seasons.

Stencil, a web-based graphic design platform, was in need of an image management solution that could handle the rendering, manipulation, and resizing of images within each design. The founders, Oliver Nassar and Adam Rotman, were aware of the complexities and potential issues associated with building their own image management and transformation platform, such as storage and memory issues, managing server farms, and the time it takes to build such a complex system. They were looking for a solution that would save them the hassle and provide users with an easy-to-use means for handling image transformations and delivering final designs that are sized perfectly for their needs.

In 2016, Fairfax Media began a wide-ranging digital transformation of its news organization, which included streamlining image management and delivery workflow. An efficient publishing workflow is key for journalists at Fairfax Media, who are responsible for posting articles, including supporting assets, such as imagery. Historically, a lot of production time was spent manipulating images to ensure they were optimized for different target devices and formats for the audience. This process was frustrating because it took valuable time from their core reporting, writing and editing duties. The team initially considered developing its own in-house image management solution, but decided to outsource these tasks to a commercial partner to save time and resources.

PetRescue, a nonprofit organization based in Australia, was facing challenges with its image management system. The organization, which helps match vulnerable animals with new homes, relies heavily on its ability to allow users to upload pictures of potential pets. However, the existing system was complex and time-consuming. When a user created a listing, their animal photos had to be uploaded to a front-end server then to an Amazon AWS S3 bucket, queued, manipulated then sent back to S3 and the image updated. This process often resulted in delays and break points, and the organization was unable to offer users any cropping or resizing functionality. Furthermore, the organization was struggling to optimize its website for mobile users, an increasingly important demographic for the site.

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.

Apartment List, a fast-growing online rental marketplace, faced a significant challenge when creating its first website in 2011. The company needed to upload millions of images of apartment interiors, property exteriors, and other images from clients and deliver them to potential renters using the site. The initial system was labor-intensive, requiring two full-time engineers to maintain the natively built system. Despite the dedicated manpower, the engineering team was unable to support the design team with all the image resolutions and aspect ratios they required. Storage was another concern as Apartment List received thousands, sometimes millions, of images at a time, so it needed a reliable storage platform that could handle the library of images and properties listed on the site as it grew.

Babolat, a leader in B2B racquet sports equipment sales, was planning to redesign its brand website to roll out its B2C e-commerce business. The company needed a digital asset management (DAM) solution to be at the center of these changes and digital transformation. Babolat was planning to launch a new brand website in eight Asian and European countries in 2020 and the United States in 2021. The company focused on designing an e-commerce ecosystem that featured inspiring videos of top players using its gear, as well as an image-rich website that showcased its products and brand. Babolat’s team started researching various DAM solutions to enable efficient management with a centralized library of assets and the ability to easily share with external teams.

Complex Networks, a global lifestyle brand and media company, was using a variety of content management systems (CMS) for different sites, each one with its own image management process. This created unnecessary complexity for teams that worked on multiple sites. The process was burdensome for both editors and developers, who had to become well versed in multiple CMS, and know the formats, sizes and restrictions unique to each website. Editors would typically have to create and upload as many as six different versions of an image per site, and oftentimes had to work with the development team to ensure the images were appropriate for the individual site. This resulted in a very time-consuming process and slower time to market. Even with these processes in place, Complex Networks found that many of its pages weren’t optimized because some editors did not follow the standards, uploading images that were too large, which caused page load time to slow and impacted visitors’ experiences.

Stylight, a fashion and design retail search engine, was facing challenges with managing and manipulating thousands of new images being added to its site each week. With a small development team, the company needed an efficient way to ensure that these images could be viewed quickly and optimally on any device used by consumers in 16 countries. The team considered on-premises options, which would require the company to host and store its own images, but decided to look for cloud solutions instead.

Atom Tickets, a social movie ticketing app and platform, was initially a mobile-only platform for iOS and Android users. They used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storing images and movie trailers on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Cloudfront, then Fastly, as its content delivery network. However, as the company grew and launched a website version of its platform in 2016, they realized the need for a robust media management platform, with integrated storage and CDN, to support a larger scale of customers across all touchpoints. They also launched a third-party website on behalf of Regal Theaters, which required its own content managers to manage their assets in a self-service fashion. Atom Tickets needed a powerful solution that could support the large scale of images, trailer videos, and other rich media assets, such as animated still pictures, that require significant bandwidth.

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.

Vorwerk, a German company known for its high-tech household appliances, faced a significant challenge in delivering high-quality images and videos to its Cookidoo® recipe platform. The platform hosts over 66,000 digital recipes and is available through the web, mobile applications, and the new generation of Thermomix® smart kitchen appliances. Delivering visual content fast, globally, to all appliances and websites, proved a considerable challenge. Vorwerk needed a content delivery network (CDN) to efficiently deliver images and videos across all the regions it serves. This was particularly challenging in China, where content must be delivered through a local CDN. Additionally, IoT devices like its flagship Thermomix® appliance have special video codec requirements. Different use cases need different video variants, which takes time, resources, and technical skills to do it right, making for a very complex situation that Vorwerk had to solve.