Frustrated by the amount of time we were wasting preparing photos for the web, we developed an easy to use internal tool to help us automatically crop and resize our photos. Although this was initially quite basic, it saved us an enormous amount of time and allowed us focus on our content rather than wasting time preparing and processing photographs.
Following our success, we continued to develop our image processor. We focused on improving image loading user experience by making our processed photos download as fast a possible, utilising a variety of compression techniques and minimizing the time to render by optimising image encoding.
As a result, our photos were faster loading, visible sooner and all neatly resized to exactly fit our pages. What's more it took us a fraction of the time to prepare photos for our new content.
We were so please with what we had produced, we gave it a name.
And here it is... Zara 4.
Zara 4 has since been further developed, introducing intelligent image compression techniques, automatic cropping options and a comprehensive REST API with OAuth authentication.
Zara 4 is owned and operated by Colin Stannard trading as Zara 4.
Zara 4, Cradducks Farm, Goudhurst Road, Staplehurst, Kent, TN12 0HQ, United Kingdom