Ok when you hear “Free Food!” what do normally do ? Get it while it's hot right ? Well then you need to get while it's hot and continue reading this review to see what exactly the folks at Cloudinary are up to. The Cloudinary image management service has just released a WordPress plugin that lets you tap into their free cloud storage for your images and take advantage of caching, optimization, image effects and much more. It is much better than the built-in media manager in wordpress as that often has difficulty uploading multiple images at the same time.
Speed up WordPress using
Free Cloudinary CDN to Host Images
Cloudinary Image Management in Wordpress
What is CDN ?
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks. Basically you are just relying on your own server
How it Works
WordPress is used by 57.1% of all the websites whose content management system we know of . This is 19.0% of all websites. So it’s only natural that Cloudinary would put their efforts into making it easy for WordPress sites to host images. Cloudinary works just like your media library within your dashboard (but like ten times better), so you never need to leave WordPress to add images to your cloud library.
Cloudinary Media Management in the Wordpress Dashboard
- Images are automatically optimized and compressed so they are delivered faster to your visitors
- Meta data is stripped out
Basic and advanced Cloudinary image controls
Features of Cloudinary CDN (All of the bells and whistles)
The really unique thing about this CDN is that it offers all kinds of image manipulations and transformations on-the-fly. Basic sizing and rotation can be done with sliding controls. More advanced image manipulations can be done directly in the dashboard with a live preview, including:
- Image formats – easily convert image formats and modify image quality.
- Apply effects & filters – sharpen, sepia, saturation, grayscale, black & white, hue, brightness, oil paint, pixelate, vignette, add borders.
- Overlays & Text – add watermarks, add image overlay and underlay, add text to the image.
- Face detection – face detection based cropping, thumbnail, multiple faces detection, pixelate faces.
- Rotates & flips – Image rotation (90 degrees), arbitrary rotation, exif-based automatic rotation, vertical & horizontal flips
- Shape alteration – add rounded corners, crop to ellipses and circles.
- Resize & crop – scale, fill, fit, pad, crop, limit, custom coordinates.
- PDF Processing – extract pages, convert to images.
In order to use the CDN, you’ll need to register for a free account. Cloudinary offers a generous, fully-featured free plan which includes:
- 500 MB Storage ( you can get more just by liking them on Facebook, Following them on Twitter or referring others to use their service)
- 50,000 Images
- 1 GB Monthly Bandwidth
This is more than enough to accommodate your average blogger and add a little performance boost. All your photos are automatically backed-up through the Cloudinary service and include revision tracking. Sites that require more can expand to a PRO account for higher usage limits with practically limitless scale. If your WordPress website slows down while trying to load images, then you have a serious problem on your hands. The Cloudinary CDN will take a load off your server and give you more creative control over your images in the dashboard. Get signed up for your free account and install the new Cloudinary image management plugin.
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