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Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The 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 The 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.
The 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.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
