Gratitude Before I deep dive into the main topic where I intend to discuss the Cloudinary Image Hosting Service as an alternative to Talkimg.com, let me begin by appreciating the monumental effort made by
joker_josue for creating
Talkimg.com, a dedicated image hosting platform for the forum purposely to improve the experience of members in the forum.
Since its creation, I've learnt how it has been instrumental in improving posts qualities of forum members by allowing them embed image files to their posts almost seamlessly.
Preamble I had the privilege of creating this topic after suggesting a solution to a legendary member of this forum on
his post. In my humble response, I also showed how you can simply
sign up to the Cloudinary platform. I believe development and improvement on this forum is a continuous process and it's what have motivated me to create this topic as an alternative solution to seamless embedding of on-the-fly tranformable images to the forum posts.
Introduction
Cloudinary is an external image hosting service/platform founded in 2011 which allows you to upload images online and transform the uploaded images through URL parameters.
Key benefits
- With Cloudinary, you can upload various file formats using different uploading methods such as direct uploads from your mobile phones, desktops, browsers and servers.
- Without having you to manually reshape or rotate your images, you can transform your uploaded images using the url-based parameters.
- Optimises your image files in the most efficient sizes and formats so you don't have to deal with delayed loading times and still have your quality image file uploaded.
- When your browser network is slow, the platform can help you readjust the image size and quality based on your network speed.
Features
- It allows you to upload various image file formats which are accepted by the forum including JPGs, JPEGs, PNGs and GIF files.
- Supports video formats which can be used as external links.
- Easy and seamless upload of images and videos.
- On-the-fly media transformations such as rotation, resizing, cropping and applying of filters.
- Strong media security measures and compliance with GDPR regulations.
- Secured storage with multiple backups and redundancies through the Amazon Web Services.
- A fast and simple content delivery network with smart selection and multi-CDN switching.
Server
Cloudinary uses Amazon Web Services known as AWS for its hosting infrastructure. The Cloudinary leverage on specific AWS services such as Amazon S3 for its storage, Amazon Cloud Front for its contents and other AWS services. With AWS services, you're rest assured of the security, scalability and global reach.
Integration
Cloudinary has offers available for integration with websites and apps through its SDKs and APIs, making it easy to integrate with programming languages including Javascript, PHP, Phython and Ruby. You can search for tutorials which have simplified the integration processes online.
Security
Your uploads are safe with Cloudinary because the platform complies with international data protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and implements strong security measures such as HTTPS for secured data transfers and to protect your media assets.
Backup
The platform uses AWS services for its storage and content delivery, so your backups are synchronized automatically on their system making it easier for to recover your media assets in the event you delete them accidentally.
Pricing Plan Option
Cloudinary supports a free tier plan which allows you to make 25,000 transformations and offers 25GB of managed storage for use in the forum and elsewhere. Once you're signed into your account, you can use this the free tier plan for the account. When you exhaust your free storage and transformation, which will take you a very long time, you can also sign up with another account for a fresh access.
They also offer various pricing tiers for members who love to subscribe for services and who might be using it outside the forum needs. But as far as the forum need is concerned, the free tier plan might just be fine.
Longevity
As per my knowledge, Cloudinary have lasted in the past 13 years since it was launched and have tried to maintained it's usability till date. While I cannot talk about it's future, I don't think it will be irrelevant for use in forum in the couple of years to come.
Customer Support
Cloudinary provides different customer supports such as email, live chat and help center on their website. They also have several resources online such as webinars tutorials, etc.
Additional information
I didn't mention from the beginning that Cloudinary is also a video management platform, so in an event where bitcointalk developers decide to include embedded videos in the platform, Cloudinary has the feature ready for the future purposes.
Advantage over Talkimg.com
The major advantage or feature it has over Talkimg.com is the advanced URL based transformation. The ability for a user to be able to readjust the size, rotation, and crop already uploaded images unlike the talkimg.com basic hosting services.
Other advantages include automated optimization, API and SDK integration and adaptive delivery of your uploaded media assets.
While this may not be directly important to the forum, you can also upload videos on Cloudinary and use the external links to explain your thoughts or theories.
Advantage of Talkimg.com over Cloudinary.com
One of the advantages I noticed is, in Talkimg.com, you do not have to sign up before you can upload your images, Talkimg.com allows you to upload and share your images almost instantly without needing to undergo sign-ups.
The second advantage is the easy-to-use user interface, Talkimg.com has a straightforward and simple-to-navigate interface. Just visit the link and upload your files then copy the embedded link and paste on the forum. Although, there's still the login feature for forum members which you can use to store your uploaded images.
Thirdly, though Cloudinary also supports the BBCode feature, the Talkimg.com was tailored for the forum use making it seamless to function in the forum. In Talkimg.com, you have no issues with bandwidth limit. I think you have an unlimited space for hosting your images unlike the Cloudinary.
Practical use cases on the forum
Below are practical examples of an image I uploaded online through the Cloudinary platform and later transformed it on the forum just by adding URL parameters to the embedded links.
Original image of an airport runway uploaded on Cloudinary by me.
To rotate to the
Right side, I added
(a_90) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To rotate to the
Down side, I added
(a_180) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To rotate to the
Right side, I added
(a_270) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To
Resize the image via the url, I added
(w_400,h_300) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To
Resize the image with aspect ratio (width) via the url, I added
(w_400) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To
Resize the image with aspect ratio (hieght) via the url, I added
(h_300) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
To
Crop the image to specific dimensions (200x200) via the url, I added
(c_crop,w_200,h_200) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
This is an original image uploaded on Cloudinary, consisting of 3 dogs.
To
Crop the image with focus (face detection on the center dog) via the url, I added
(c_crop,w_200,h_200) parameters to the URL after the /upload directly on the forum embedded link.
External links •
Cloudinary Documentation•
Cloudinary Support•
Cloudinary Blog•
Cloudinary YouTube Video
