The Hub Turns to Cloudinary to Power its Fast-growing Photographer Marketplace
Focused on reimagining the way brands hire creative talent, The Hub relies on Cloudinary to deliver high-quality portfolios and greatly reduce workflow time and cost
Cloudinary, the media management platform for many of the world’s top brands, today announced that The Hub, an online marketplace that connects brands with creators, is using Cloudinary to help its community of photographers and videographers quickly upload assets to personal portfolios on the platform.
The Hub provides brands access to more than 39,000 creatives, enabling them to quickly find and hire highly vetted talent in every major U.S. city. These creatives deliver final images and video through The Hub platform five times faster than traditional agencies and production houses for one-ninth of the price, on average. Before a project can begin, however, photographers and videographers must curate a personal portfolio on the platform, a process that requires creatives to upload their best photos and videos to showcase their skills.
At any given moment, creative portfolios across the website support more than 2.5 million photos and videos. In order for these portfolios to load quickly, The Hub must reduce each asset file size. But with as many as 10 unique sizes and aspect ratio combinations required for each uploaded asset, their front-end developers could not easily manage this process manually. In order to automate the entire process, The Hub deployed the Cloudinary platform.
“Cloudinary was exciting to us for two main reasons,” said James Cole, founder, The Hub. “The first was the automatic optimization of smaller file sizes without any negative impact on quality. After all, the visual quality of our creatives’ portfolios is critical to them landing work with today’s leading DTC brands – it’s non-negotiable. The second benefit we were seeking was the efficient resizing for different aspect ratios and device requirements.”
The user experience for photographers and videographers building their portfolios is now entirely dynamic. The algorithms behind Cloudinary’s solution resize and optimize assets intelligently, and much more efficiently than a human could. “In terms of size, we’re able to get images and video to be a lot smaller and therefore more performant,” said Cole. “Not only that, but optimized assets are cheaper for us from a storage perspective, too.”
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“At Cloudinary, we know how important high-quality visuals are to brands today, and we recognize the profound way that The Hub is turning the old model of agency-driven creative on its head,” said Roni Feldsher, Cloudinary’s Director of Customer Success. “We are pleased the Cloudinary platform has enabled The Hub to provide a seamless workflow for simple and efficient portfolio building, and are proud to play a role in elevating the work of talented creatives across the country.”
“Content is king for everyone in 2020, but for us at The Hub, it’s our lifeblood,” said Cole. “Outsourcing how we serve images speaks volumes: we empower another party to serve the very linchpin of our company, and that third party is Cloudinary.”
