You may have an endless list of presets and variants you have to create for your client to prepare for their production. As setting up presets and variants is a manual job there is the possibility of mistakes. Luckily, Creative Force has partnered up with Cloudinary to auto-generate variants for you, meaning the variants will be created automatically.
This is an add-on to your account. Please contact your account manager for more details.
Note:
This article is about using Creative Force's Cloudinary instance to generate auto-variants. You can use your own Cloudinary instance to generate auto-variants with this setting here. The rest of the preset setup
Once you have this feature enabled on your account, you will see ‘Add auto variant’ in the Presets set up.
Please note that in order to have auto variants work effectively, you have to meet the following requirements:
The main variant has to be “Manual”. This means that you have to create the main variant yourself and input the settings.
An auto-variant is always based on a manual variant. This manual variant can be the main one or a secondary variant.
Within the specs for the auto-variant, you will see the option to select:
Auto Resize:
No Resize: Main image’s size will be kept when the variants are generated
Resize to Fit: Image is resized to fit within a bounding box defined by the specified dimensions below. The aspect ratio of the original image will be retained.
Resize and Pad: Image is resized to the dimensions below and maintains the original aspect ratio. If target dimensions do not match the original aspect ratio, padding is added to reach the desired size.
Please note that Padding Type, Gravity, and Color are only applied to the image when the target aspect ratio differs from the original – this is only possible when both the width and height are defined. However, the system still allows you to define one of the two, Width or Height.
If the aspect ratio of the original image does not match the target dimensions, padding is added to the image to reach the desired size.
Padding type: this will determine how to fill in the padding when the target dimensions are different than the original image’s aspect ratio. Here, you can select between:
Solid fill: this is the default option, you will be able to select the color for the padding fill.
Generative fill: this is a beta feature from Cloudinary. With this option, you can utilize Cloudinary’s generative fill to extend the existing image into the padded area. More info about this feature can be found on Cloudinary docs here.
Note:
Generative Fill is not supported when the Main variant has a transparent background.
When the main variant has a color background and you select ‘No Change’ as background color for the auto-variant, the default padding color is kept as per the main variant’s.
Auto Cropping:
No Cropping: no cropping will be applied.
Cropping: you will be able to select the cropping gravity South - South East - East - Center... and set the dimension.
Face Detection: you will be able to select the cropping gravity Face - Faces and set the dimension. Within the Face Detection option, you can select three different cropping modes:
Fill: resizes the image to fill the specified dimensions without distortion. The image may be cropped as a result.
Crop: extracts a region of the specified dimensions from the original image without first resizing it.
Thumb: creates a thumbnail of the image with the specified dimensions, based on a specified gravity. Scaling may occur.
Then from the Style guide’s Asset section, you will see a ‘lightning icon’ to know which are auto variants. And of course, you can set up the naming convention or conditional rules for the variants as normal.
Note:
The auto variants will be displayed in the Assets tab once the task is Done at Asset Delivery.
The assets must go through a post-production step for auto-variants to be created.
It is not possible to generate an auto variant that is larger in dimension than the original file that was input.
When the background color of the variant needs to be changed (different than the background of the main file) we do recommend producing the main file on a transparent background for the background change to work properly as otherwise we can not guarantee optimal results (images might appear slightly overexposed)
If you are not using your own Cloudinary instance to generate the auto-variants by setting it up here, your auto-variants will be generated by Creative Force's Cloudinary instance. Please note that using our instance, there will be a limit of 100MB for input and output files.