Hipcamp Heads Outdoors to Optimize Images, Improve Page Load Time With Cloudinary

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

• Business Operation
• Sales & Marketing

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• Software Design & Engineering Services

Hipcamp, a website that allows campers to discover great destinations, faced challenges in managing thousands of images of varying quality, size, and format, uploaded by campers and property owners. Developers had to individually reformat, crop and resize each photo to meet Hipcamp’s quality standards. To ensure these images appeared correctly, regardless of how the visitors were viewing them, developers had to make multiple versions of images, designed specifically for desktops, tablets, or phone viewing. But with a team of only 11 engineers, who work on the full stack, managing images could be a full time job, leaving them less time to focus on continually innovating the company’s offerings to its users.

Hipcamp has a mission of getting more people outside, and inspiring the next generation of individuals who are passionate about exploring and protecting our lands. This starts with access, both to land, and the information about where they can experience the land through camping. Hipcamp takes the complexity out of planning camping trips, making it quick and easy to find and book campsites in a variety of locations. Hipcamp’s site features unique camping experiences at more than 7,800 parks, 16,300 campgrounds and 346,200 campsites across the United States, including ranches, vineyards, and public parks.

Hipcamp implemented Cloudinary’s image management solution to automate cropping and image optimization, enabling instant public delivery of photos, automatic tagging based on content recognition, and faster loading of webpages. Using Cloudinary’s upload widget, Hipcamp developed a dashboard through which hosts can upload photos for their listing pages. A Cloudinary JS plug-in enables uploads of 12 photos at a time by hosts and campers. For the production shoots done by professional photographers, Hipcamp relies on a Ruby on Rails app, using Carrier Wave, that enables them to upload hundreds of photos at one time. Cloudinary enables Hipcamp to serve JPEG or WebP versions, using the f_auto functionality to determine the best version to serve based on the web browser being used by visitors. Hipcamp also controls the quality of the photo, using Cloudinary’s q_auto feature, for image optimization, ensuring that all pages load fast and deliver the highest quality image possible.

• Hipcamp developers have saved hundreds of hours managing and transforming the 3.8 million of images on the site since implementing Cloudinary.
• Cloudinary makes it intuitive for the engineers to store and access images, and add new formats, such as WebP, which has helped to reduce file sizes even more.
• The ability to auto-tag images based on their content allowed Hipcamp to implement a dynamic file naming system based on those tags.

• Half a second page load time on desktop
• Improved SEO for images
• Faster time to market due to reduced dependencies