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. 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 Fit:
Fit: you will be able to set the dimension for the image, but keep in mind that the variant image will still follow the aspect ratio of the main image.
No Fit: the variant image will follow the cropping dimension.
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 only appear in the asset delivery location
The workflow must have a post-production step in order to create the main variant.
It is not possible to generate an auto variant that is larger in dimension than the original file that was input.
Currently, input and output files that are bigger than 100MB are not supported.
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 over exposed)