Cloudinary Case Studies Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management

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	Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management Cloudinary

Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management

Cloudinary

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Functions	Sales & Marketing
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Challenge	Apartment List, a fast-growing online rental marketplace, faced a significant challenge when creating its first website in 2011. The company needed to upload millions of images of apartment interiors, property exteriors, and other images from clients and deliver them to potential renters using the site. The initial system was labor-intensive, requiring two full-time engineers to maintain the natively built system. Despite the dedicated manpower, the engineering team was unable to support the design team with all the image resolutions and aspect ratios they required. Storage was another concern as Apartment List received thousands, sometimes millions, of images at a time, so it needed a reliable storage platform that could handle the library of images and properties listed on the site as it grew. Read More
About Customer	Apartment List is one of the fastest-growing online rental marketplaces in the world, helping its users with everything from searching for a new apartment to handling applications and payments. The company’s Webby-award winning site draws more than 2.5 million monthly visits, with mobile accounting for 70 percent of traffic. In 2014, Apartment List introduced a top-rated iOS app. It was named the #3 fastest growing company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read More
Solution	Cloudinary, a cloud-based image management solution, was chosen by Apartment List to handle their image management needs. Cloudinary enables Apartment List to effectively take any image format – JPEGs, PNGs and others – in a variety of resolutions, and transform them all into a format that works best for each browser or mobile client. Apartment List picks up data feeds of images from all of the apartment communities featured on its site, and uploads them into Cloudinary. After being given a unique ID, each image undergoes different transformations so it can be used in mobile and desktop versions of the site. With Cloudinary, Apartment List also is able to filter out low quality images (low resolution, pictures of people faces, logos, etc.) and label pictures to help identify the features of the apartments being shown. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Challenge

Apartment List, a fast-growing online rental marketplace, faced a significant challenge when creating its first website in 2011. The company needed to upload millions of images of apartment interiors, property exteriors, and other images from clients and deliver them to potential renters using the site. The initial system was labor-intensive, requiring two full-time engineers to maintain the natively built system. Despite the dedicated manpower, the engineering team was unable to support the design team with all the image resolutions and aspect ratios they required. Storage was another concern as Apartment List received thousands, sometimes millions, of images at a time, so it needed a reliable storage platform that could handle the library of images and properties listed on the site as it grew.

About Customer

Apartment List is one of the fastest-growing online rental marketplaces in the world, helping its users with everything from searching for a new apartment to handling applications and payments. The company’s Webby-award winning site draws more than 2.5 million monthly visits, with mobile accounting for 70 percent of traffic. In 2014, Apartment List introduced a top-rated iOS app. It was named the #3 fastest growing company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Solution

Cloudinary, a cloud-based image management solution, was chosen by Apartment List to handle their image management needs. Cloudinary enables Apartment List to effectively take any image format – JPEGs, PNGs and others – in a variety of resolutions, and transform them all into a format that works best for each browser or mobile client. Apartment List picks up data feeds of images from all of the apartment communities featured on its site, and uploads them into Cloudinary. After being given a unique ID, each image undergoes different transformations so it can be used in mobile and desktop versions of the site. With Cloudinary, Apartment List also is able to filter out low quality images (low resolution, pictures of people faces, logos, etc.) and label pictures to help identify the features of the apartments being shown.

Impact #1	Automation has saved the equivalent of one full-time engineer managing day-to-day operations
Impact #2	Thousands of man-hours required previously to transform images were saved
Impact #3	Cloudinary has allowed Apartment List to solve their operational issues, produce various resolutions of images and cache them at endpoints closer to the end user for an optimal user experience

Impact #1

Automation has saved the equivalent of one full-time engineer managing day-to-day operations

Impact #2

Thousands of man-hours required previously to transform images were saved

Impact #3

Cloudinary has allowed Apartment List to solve their operational issues, produce various resolutions of images and cache them at endpoints closer to the end user for an optimal user experience

Benefit #1	Conversion rates increased nearly 20% after a redesign of its listing detail page

Benefit #1

Conversion rates increased nearly 20% after a redesign of its listing detail page

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Overview

Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit