I use Cloudinary primarily for hosting and storing images. It's a tool I use when it's required by the company's needs, such as hosting media files.
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Simple to tag items and organize your favourites, however navigating isn't straightforward
What do you like best about the product?
It's simple to tag items and organize your favourites, making it convenient to access them later.
What do you dislike about the product?
Navigating the platform isn't very straightforward, and locating assets based on their resolution can be challenging. Lack of transparent overview to folder hierarchy.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Assign assets to different web modules.
An intuitive placeholder for storing the assets
What do you like best about the product?
The ability to update image with handy AI tools on edit.
The ease of finding the assets easily through search
The ease of finding the assets easily through search
What do you dislike about the product?
For an asset within a folder, I wanted to know if I uploaded the image against an older image without having to go to Open > Summary navigation. Maybe grouping of the image within the folder will help such case.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Providing a storage system to store the images/videos that can be shared and linked within the web application
Positive Experience
What do you like best about the product?
It works. I use this just for the assets feature but haven't had any issues.
What do you dislike about the product?
The asset URL changes when you move them to a differnet location.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Asset storage for html.
Overall a good product!
What do you like best about the product?
The SDKs are very nice and relatively easy to use, most of the time. The features Cloudinary provides aside from basic media upload and retrieval are very handy.
What do you dislike about the product?
The documentation could be better. Sometimes it's hard to find information on certain things. More examples might help as well.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Uploading, storing, compressing, and serving media.
Cloudinary is an effective resource for my day-to-day work.
What do you like best about the product?
Love the broad range of options, ease of usability, and general platform layout. I use it daily and it's easy to integrate into our newsletter sends, which I run.
What do you dislike about the product?
Wish it were slightly more intuitive and collaborative amongst teams.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It stores all of our images, including stock images and studio shots we have taken ourselves.
Reliable image hosting and storage improve organization but setup complexity challenges new users
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Cloudinary is valuable for storing and hosting images, especially because it allows for easy storage and organization of media files. This feature is particularly useful when dealing with large amounts of images. Additionally, Cloudinary offers capabilities to create folders and organize images effectively under user-specific folders, which enhances usability for social media purposes.
What needs improvement?
The UI needs improvement because it has become quite messy recently, making it difficult to locate the media library and images. Additionally, the initial setup process is complex due to the numerous options available, which can be challenging for new users.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Cloudinary for around one year, or less.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cloudinary is stable and reliable. It does not break down or have noticeable bugs.
How are customer service and support?
I have not needed to contact customer service. I rely on Cloudinary's documentation for any help needed.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
Cloudinary is hard to set up because it requires converting base64 URLs to blob URLs and other technical steps before implementation. The setup process can be challenging without proper documentation guidance.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I did not research Cloudinary's pricing, as I am using it for free. In the free service, it performs well.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise new users to read the documentation thoroughly to understand how to upload and store images effectively. For those using Cloudinary for the first time, be prepared for a learning curve, but it is beneficial to adapt to new tools. Overall, I would rate the solution as seven out of ten due to its complexity in implementation but its effectiveness in image storage.
Better than other cloud picture providers
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use:
Downloading a folder that contains all of the pictures from a campagin is useful. Especially since it's a faster download compared to how other manufactureres provide the pictures.
Downloading a folder that contains all of the pictures from a campagin is useful. Especially since it's a faster download compared to how other manufactureres provide the pictures.
What do you dislike about the product?
The way all files are stored in a tradional computer type folder system. Sometimes you have to go through 5 folders to find the picture you are after. If there was better organization tools this could help.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having access to OEM pictures in quick and uniform way.
Good Features, Never had an issue with services and product
What do you like best about the product?
The scaling and transformation of images
What do you dislike about the product?
The inability to compress images in bulk. It would be a great feature to pick a folder and say compress images down to this quality. This would compress the original image reducing storage costs.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Dedicated CDN to host images and perform transformations
Easy for beginners but comes at a high price
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company while developing an app. I use it as a way to store our company's images for the websites that I made.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I like that the tool takes care of transforming the images. For example, you can have an image that is 15 MB in size, and Cloudinary can take that image, upload it to the servers, and compress it. When developing the websites, I can get the images stored in Cloudinary in any format that I want and resize them as I wish.
What needs improvement?
The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required.
Cloudinary's documentation part has certain shortcomings when compared to the ones provided by the other tools on the market, so I think it needs to be improved. The documentation part is not that easy to follow, especially for beginners.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cloudinary for a year. I am a customer of the tool.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I haven't faced any stability issues with the product over the year that I have used it. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I don't remember about the product's scalability part, but I think the tool has limits. When you go through the tool's plans, you will see that the solution has plans like 250 credits, which accounts for 250 GB or something. After that, you have to contact the tool's support to scale more. I am not sure about the tool's scaling ability. If one day, my business had 600 GB of storage, and I needed to scale it up, then it wouldn't be easy for me. I have to contact the solution team and figure it out. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Around six people in my company use the product.
How are customer service and support?
The tool's support team is very prompt. When I gave the tool's support team a clear description of my problem, they gave me the help I wanted and directed me to the solution to my issue. The team is good when it comes to response time and knowledge. I rate the tool's support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used AWS, but it was not focused on specializing in images. It is just a storage tool.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The tool's pricing is very high. If you are an established company, I think it is worth the money since getting images on the web with the highest quality is very hard, but Cloudinary is good at handling such areas.
What other advice do I have?
To use the integration capabilities of the product, I use the product's documentation to integrate it with my other tools, like Node.js.
I have not used or integrated with the AI capabilities of the product.
I would recommend the tool to people who are starting out because Cloudinary has initial plans in which it gives you 25 GB of storage, which is very good for someone who is just starting out and needs to assess their business.
Considering the expensive nature of the product, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
Offers broad API for image transformation, which was easy to understand with their tutorials but inability to easily work with folders when using the API
What is our primary use case?
We used Cloudinary as a library within our project's tech stack, primarily for image transformation.
It was an online platform for selling artwork. There was a requirement that when an artist uploads an image to the website, it should instantly create mockups of how the artwork would look in various interior spaces. Because of this requirement, we switched from S3 on AWS to Cloudinary.
How has it helped my organization?
The automation tools were used most often. They are quite convenient and cover our requirements.
It actually supports the growth of the business because it gives us a lot of out of the box things. We can easily do things in a week that we weren't able to do before.
What is most valuable?
First, it has a broad API for image transformation, which was easy to understand with their tutorials. It took about a week to get everything working.
Second, they have a great UI that makes it easy to search and organize images. I think the combination of these two things makes Cloudinary very valuable.
What needs improvement?
Cloudinary is great for image and video transformation, especially when clients download assets to your website, and you need to manipulate them. They also have a free tier, which is great for trying out the platform before committing and understanding the platform.
However, there was one issue I remember: the inability to easily work with folders when using the API. For example, we couldn't delete all images from a folder at once due to limitations, likely because they use AWS and S3. It wasn't a major issue, but it would have been more convenient to have that functionality.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Cloudinary extensively for about half a year on a certain project.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I don't recall any bugs or unavailability issues. It was a quite stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There were three of us using it: I was the admin, and two others were users.
How are customer service and support?
I contacted the customer service and support at the beginning, I had a question about a transformation that wasn't working as expected. I asked the question in their Discord group, and they quickly provided assistance.
Cloudinary support was quite responsive.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
We used it as a dependency in our Java project. Adding the dependencies and working with the API was not difficult. Cloudinary provided a detailed tutorial explaining the protocols for transformations and other features.
Cloudinary also has excellent documentation. If you need help with something, you'll definitely find the information you need. I don't recall any major problems during the process. It obviously takes some time to explore and learn, but it's not overly complex.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
From what I've used, it's actually cheap compared to other options like AWS.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There was some research done. From my side, Cloudinary caught my eye because of their helpful tutorials sent via email, especially the Java-specific quickstart guide since we were using Java. It was a quick start for us – we knew upfront what we needed to do and could see results immediately.
Additionally, I remember a video on Cloudinary's website or YouTube that showcased image transformations. It showed how images could look like pencil drawings or paintings, which aligned with our requirements. We realized that Cloudinary could meet our needs, and it wasn't so hard to opt for it.
What other advice do I have?
It's easy for a beginner to learn to use Cloudinary.
My advice/recommendation depends on your business projects and requirements. But if you work with digital assets like images, Cloudinary is a good option. I haven't explored video features extensively, but for image manipulation, it's definitely suitable. If your project is small to medium-sized, it's perhaps the best choice.
I even recommended Cloudinary to a friend in the industry who was looking for ways to work with images.
If I didn't have a lot of time to explore, I would definitely choose Cloudinary. But if I had more time and ownership of the decision, I might explore the market again. Not because I'm dissatisfied with Cloudinary, but to understand the broader view of what's available, since I haven't been in this area for some time.
Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. Cloudinary has a good user interface (UI), but there are some things the product can improve, like convenience. For example, compared to another tool I've used, Stripe, Cloudinary's UI feels a little lacking. There's room for improvement.
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