When you run a business, a large fraction of its success depends on marketing and its ability to keep up with digitization. This is why itâs so important to keep up with the latest technology to ensure that youâre putting out the perfect image and message about your company and its services and products. Image optimization is simply the process of reducing the file size of an image. Using a script or a plugin to speed up the loading of a web page. This is significant because large-sized images slow down your website or blog and reduce the quality of your user experience.
However, we must proceed with caution when performing image optimization because resizing an image may result in undesirable outcomes such as image quality depletion, which has a devastating impact on the quality of our web pages. The harm that a poorly optimized image can do to our web pages is almost as bad as not optimizing an image at all, so we must exercise extreme caution.
Quick Tips to Optimizing Images without Losing Quality
- Use good images
- Use multiple image angles
- Save your images with the right dimensions
- Use white backgrounds if possible
- Try out different quality settings
What Are Cloud Services?
In a nutshell, cloud services are a broad category of internet-based services made available to individuals and businesses all over the world. These services make it simple, are inexpensive, and are reliable enough to get the internet-related resources and tools you need to get internettasks done without having to buy or maintain the software yourself. For the most part, employees don’t realize how much they rely on cloud computing.
To ensure that cloud computing services run smoothly, cloud computing vendors and service providers must take care of them. Customers don’t have to own their own servers or host their own applications because these service providers make their servers available to them.
How Are Cloud Services Delivered?
Most of the time, cloud services are given to customers and businesses through a public cloud, a private cloud, or a combination of the two.
The provider makes public cloud services available to many clients all over the web. Some examples of public cloud are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. When you use public cloud services, one of the best things is that you can make your resources available to a lot of different customers on the web. This makes companies more likely to give their employees more freedom to do things on their own than they did before.
In contrast to public cloud services, private cloud services are not open to all customers on the web. These are made just for one company. Most of the time, these are made for companies that work with very sensitive information, like banking and healthcare. These cloud services normallyhave advanced security protocols.
A hybrid cloud service is just the combination of a public cloud service and a private cloud service. This is used when a company wants to store sensitive data in the private cloud but also wants employees to have access to other resources that are stored in the public cloud for the day-to-day running of the company. A single IT management console is used to establish and maintain communication and partnership between both clouds.
Cloud Services for Image Optimization
We have two major cloud services for image resizing and optimization:
- Google cloud platform (GCP), which is Google’s cloud computing service.
- ImageKit, a cloud-based end-to-end image management, and delivery service.
Google Cloud is Google’s service. Over the years, GCP has become a major competitor to other cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, and AWS. GCP has a feature known as cloud storage that allows its users to store images in the cloud. This feature is likened to one provided by AWS S3 that allows you to save files in the cloud. Understanding AWS S3 can be difficult for users, as evidenced by a review; therefore, we recommend that users watch a tutorial on AWS Lambda image resize with ImageMagick to better understand the process. They also have nearly infinite storage space on a practical scale.
GCP can store images and make them available to individuals all over the world, and many businesses take advantage of this feature.
It does, however, have some flaws-
- GCP cloud storage doesnât have image optimization tools like the conversion to AVIF or WebP.
- It doesnât allow its users to manipulate images in real-time to permit the processing of authentic images on different devices.
- It doesnât allow image compression which makes them portable for web delivery.
The world is advancing at a breakneck pace, with high-quality demands for a more seamless user experience. Individuals and online businesses would require image optimization and transformations in order to deliver high-quality content. As a company or individual user of cloud services for image resizing and optimization, you may not possess the dedication to manually optimize all of the images you require one by one because you undoubtedly have other businesses to run and important tasks that require your attention.
Imagekit can be integrated with Google Cloud to supplement the process and assist you to optimize images in minutes.
ImageKit
ImageKit is an end-to-end cloud-based image management service that lets you manage and deliver images seamlessly. It has CDN storage delivery and can change images and videos using more than 50 different tools. ImageKit has AWS CloudFront built-in as CDN. You can keep using Google cloud with the help of ImageKit’s support team, which will help you with its plan. As mentioned above, you can connect ImageKit to your Google Cloud Storage.
Some users say that the best feature of ImageKit is its ability to merge with Google Cloud Storage. It lets you use the large storage space of Google Cloud and the great image optimization features of ImageKit at the same time. ImageKit can actually be connected to any kind of external storage. It is used by over 600 companies and 35,000 companies to send out billions of highly optimized images.
Google Cloud Storage and ImageKit Integration
Letâs review the steps that need to be taken when optimizing and resizing images in cloud storage with ImageKit
1. ImageKit Account
The first thing is to sign up for an ImageKit account. Every month, it provides a fully functional free account that has a delivery bandwidth of 20GB. This is normally enough for blogs with a few visitors per month. If necessary, higher-level plans are available. ImageKit offers a variety of image optimization to six regions around the world depending on your location, so it is best to select the geographically closest cloud storage server to your location.
2. Creating Access Keys To Access The Objects In The Bucket
Because images in private storage cannot be accessed using the object URL, we must create access keys on the Google cloud to gain access to the files on our bucket.
3. Attaching Your Cloud Storage To Imagekit
The next thing you need to do is connect ImageKit to cloud storage. This lets ImageKit get the original pictures in the bucket when it needs to.
Perform these tasks step by step:
- On the ImageKit dashboard, click “external storage” and click “add new originâ.
- The tray opens, and then youselect “Google Cloud Storage” as “origin type.”
- Now you can fill other fields, such as bucket name and bucket folder, with whatever you want. You can personalize your bucket to fit your style and comfort. ImageKit parses the files automatically and fills for “Google service account private key” and “Google service account client Email.” After that, click the submit button.
- The final step is to navigate to the ImageKit dashboard’s “URL Endpoints”. Under the default URL endpoint, you’ll find your newly created cloud storage origin. If it does not, click “edit URL endpoint” and add the origin to the ImageKit URL.
Congratulations, your configuration is complete.
Request Flow for Optimized Images in Cloud Storage with ImageKit
- Now that you’ve finished connecting Google Cloud Storage and the ImageKit. Using your Imagekit URL, you can now access your images and videos in cloud storage.
- The image will be delivered from a cached version of its CDN or other internal caches if it has them.
- When ImageKit does not have the optimized and resized image in its cache. The image kit retrieves the original video or image from the storage device attached to the ImageKit and processes it in real-time. The images are then sent to the user. Depending on the input image, the average time for thisis 100-200ms.
If you do it right by following the steps mentioned above, resizing images, optimizing them, and processing them using cloud services can be a simple and rewarding experience. The quality of images that can be found on the internet today has significantly improved as a direct result of the application of this technique. It is safe to say that the advent of cloud services has turned our experience of viewing images on the internet into an exciting new adventure.