It’s no secret that customers want to see and engage with images, photos and other visual media assets. We live in a media-rich world where visuals hold people’s interest longer than text and allows businesses to communicate with users in ways that other forms of content cannot. When you optimize and harness the power of visual media assets, you can reap a wide range of business benefits.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that image and video bandwidth have grown tremendously over the past year. In fact, according to Cloudinary’s data, image bandwidth traffic has increased 25% across all industries! Furthermore, their data also demonstrates the need for brands to support a dizzying  range of devices and engagement touch points, including game consoles and smart TVs.

If you want to be a market leader and scale your business, it’s not enough to simply share a few images and videos on your website. You should develop a strategy for effective digital asset management and optimization through the whole digital asset lifecycle, from creation, storage, and distribution to deletion. Thankfully Cloudinary can help with that. This AI-powered cloud platform, used by big names like Bombas, Nintendo, Atlassian and General Mills, is transforming the way that businesses handle their media assets in our hyper-digital world.

Features and Benefits of Using Cloudinary

Robust Video API

Think of Cloudinary’s APIs as a way to supercharge your business. It enables developers to automate video creation, analysis, management, editing, and delivery. By using their set of APIs, which includes video streaming API, editing video API and more, developers can easily integrate video experiences into existing websites or applications without having to do custom development.

Advanced Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Cloudinary’s bread and butter is its ability to help businesses centralize and organize digital assets, making them easily accessible and shareable. There’s a wide range of tasks that brands can complete with Cloudinary’s robust DAM solution. For example, uploading a photographer’s photos and videos, tagging and sharing them and performing sophisticated searches to find the right assets for a new design or campaign or final delivery in your website or app. In short, effective DAM ensures that digital assets are easily found by users while the business or organization maintains full control over them. 

What happens when you streamline and automate your digital asset management processes? You save your business precious time and resources while simultaneously elevating the visual experience through quick and responsive delivery of media to your customers.

Dynamic Media Optimization

Media optimization consists of delivering images and streaming videos at the smallest possible file size while maintaining visual quality. This translates into saving space and improving performance, whether it’s on your website, app or another digital property. 

For example, if you have an ecommerce website with a large catalog and a high amount of traffic, media optimization will allow for faster page load times and improved user experiences, which can lead to improved SEO and higher conversion rates.

Scalability and Performance

Cloudinary’s cloud-based infrastructure, which was built specifically to support high load and handle virtually an unlimited number of assets and usage, allows businesses to seamlessly scale their media delivery and management as their needs grow. Their servers automatically scale to manage large traffic peaks and evenly distribute loads between servers in their network. So whether you’re a small startup or a well-established enterprise company, you can rely on Cloudinary’s features to deliver the best visual experiences to your customers and ensure the user experience goes smoothly.

AI-Powered Automation

Cloudinary leverages cutting-edge AI to make digital asset management a breeze. With it, you can dramatically reduce the workload for content creators and designers and general manual intervention. Automatically crop, resize and enhance images to create the best user experience and streamline digital asset management and analysis. Here are the specific tasks you can complete with Cloudinary’s patented AI technology:

Generative AI

• Generative fill: Use outpainting to expand images with matching content.

• Generative remove: Remove objects via open-set object detection.

• Generative replace: Detect and replace objects and colors.

Natural Language Features Through LLMs (Large Language Models)

• AI-Powered image captioning: Generate powerful natural language image descriptions through large language models (currently in beta).

• Conversational transformation builder: This feature will use natural language through ChatGPT to generate powerful transformations (coming soon).

Image and Video Analysis and Asset Management

• Smart tagging: Metadata through object detection powered by leading tools.

• Object-aware cropping for image and video: Auto-crop assets with a focus on specified objects.

• AI-powered video previews: Generate compelling video previews at scale with Cloudinary’s API.

• Advanced visual search for assets: This asset search is based on image similarity and natural language queries (currently in beta).

Enhanced User Experience

Beautiful, user-friendly digital experiences are important to audiences across many industries–from ecommerce stores and media and entertainment companies to nonprofits and retailers. 

Here’s how Cloudinary enables you to enhance the user experience, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement and conversions:

• Responsive media automatically optimized for screen size

• Performance optimization for fast-loading media while retaining fidelity

• Real-time video highlights

• Deliver file size and format based on end users’ device and bandwidth for smooth, uninterrupted experience

• Reliable, high-speed, high-redundancy delivery 

• Immersive experiences by leveraging 3D media, virtual showrooms and more

• Product Gallery–a customizable interactive user interface for displaying your products to your users on your website or application

Streamlined Social Media Sharing

To effectively communicate with your audience through social media, your business needs to ensure the aesthetic and messaging on your social channels come together in a cohesive manner. A big part of achieving this is implementing proper management of your digital assets. 

There are a few ways that Cloudinary’s platform can take your social media management from “meh” to “wow!”

• Centralized asset repository: Whether you have hundreds or hundreds of thousands of assets, having one centralized repository where everything is properly stored, tagged and categorized makes life so much easier. 

• Branding and style guidelines: Your brand is how you show your business to the world. Make sure everything you share on social media looks good and is consistent with your brand messaging.

• Content calendar and scheduling: Gain clarity about what content gets shared and when. Schedule posts in advance so that your team is organized and gains time for other tasks. Avoid the stress that comes with last-minute content creation.

• Approval workflows: Establish a consistent approval workflow that ensures content is reviewed by the necessary parties before publication.

Unleash the Power of Your Media with Cloudinary

For businesses that have an online presence, powerful visual storytelling is a must-have. Whether you’re an online clothing shop or a digital media publication, you use images and videos to connect with your audience. When you have thousands of assets at your disposal, you need a powerful solution to ensure you deliver media quickly, efficiently and in a way that your customers can understand and appreciate. That’s why our team loves Cloudinary–it acts as the single source of truth for managing and optimizing the entire lifecycle of your image and video assets.

Need help getting the most out of Cloudinary for your business? Our API integration experts are here to help!

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