In this update we’re introducing time-saving 360-spin tools, new CDN locations and SEO features. Plus, we’ve added new integrations and updated our existing ones. Read on to learn more.

Let’s kick things off with one of the most requested features:

Export 360 spins to marketplaces

It’s now a breeze to submit your 360 spins to online marketplaces. Sirv saves you all the painstaking work of resizing, renaming and reformatting your images. Just enter the appropriate product ID, and we’ll create zips ready for submission to Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe’s & Grainger:

• Spins for Amazon
• Spins for Home Depot
• Spins for Walmart
• Spins for Lowe’s
• Spins for Grainger

New CDN server locations

Four more CDN locations have been added, to ensure that your images and spins load lightning-fast, no matter where your customers are.

The newly added locations are:

• Christchurch, New Zealand
• Seoul, South Korea
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Phoenix, Arizona

SEO-friendly image URLs

Optimizing image file names for SEO can be a daunting task. Here’s an example of a standard image URL: https://demo.sirv.com/demo/DSC001.jpg. The file name is non-descriptive and doesn’t help search engines understand what the image is about. Normally, you’d have to rename the image to reap the benefits of image SEO to the max. Renaming images leads to other rather unpleasant things you need to handle, like changing links, or setting up redirects. That’s why we’ve developed an effortless method to provide SEO-optimized image URLs, eliminating the need to rename images.

Here’s how it works, let’s take the same image and simply modify the URL with a descriptive name (the bold part):

https://demo.sirv.com/demo/DSC001.jpg/adidas-superstar-white-shoe.jpg It’s as simple as that.

Learn more about using SEO-friendly image URLs.

File/folder info

Introducing our latest UI update: View info (accessible from the context menu). Whether you’re tracking file sizes for optimization, checking creation dates, or who added the file or folder, this nifty feature ensures you have all the information at your fingertips.

Within two clicks, gain insights into:

• Type of file or folder
• Size and total item count, inclusive of subfolders (for folders)
• Exact location of your files/folders (useful in search)
• Creation date and the creator (when available)
• Last modified date

New usage statistics

The new usage statistics dashboard gives you a birds eye view over all the important metric of your account like:

• Storage usage breakdown
• Bandwidth usage
• Rate limits

New User management

The new and improved user management dashboard streamlines both team management and the process of inviting new members. At a single glance, you can see who’s got access to your account and the exact permissions they have. Inviting new users and assigning them an appropriate role has never been easier.

Auto alt text

AI has seen explosive growth this year, and we’re adding time-saving AI tools to Sirv. We’ve updated our automatic alt tag generation guide, and we’ve built an alt text generation tool — tell us if you’d like to try it.

Base64 text overlays

Adding text to images is a great way to personalize your images, or to automate your website’s OG images . But there was one little drawback with adding text to Sirv images, not all symbols could be used. We’ve fixed that.

Use any special characters you desire in your text overlays, with Base64 encoding. Learn more

Support for larger images

We’ve upgraded our capacity to support larger images — previously 32 MB, now potentially up to 128 MB. Now your customers can zoom even deeper into your artwork, photos, maps and infographics. And you can, perhaps, uncover some subtle details in these fine works of art:

Updated plugins and Github action

Sirv extensions have new features and deeper integration for WordPress, Shopify, Magento and PrestaShop. Some highlights are below.

WordPress

• Serve CSS background images from Sirv
• New automatic sync option upon image upload
• Lots of tweaks and improvements (plugin page with changelog)

Magento

• Faster image sync
• Now supports 3D models
• Many more improvements (full changelog)

GitHub action

With Sirv’s GitHub Action you can automatically sync images from your GitHub repository to Sirv. This makes it very easy to add Sirv content to your CI/CD pipeline.

We’ve been deep in product development over the past few months, adding new functionality to improve your Sirv experience.

Let’s start with some nice quality of life improvements:

See the number of items in a folder without opening it

We find it especially useful for identifying empty folders.

Newly uploaded files are highlighted with a dot

Quickly identify freshly uploaded files with the help of this subtle visual queue.

Arrow navigation in preview mode

Easily navigate between images with this neat update.

Hotkeys for file management

Hold down the Shift key to select multiple files, or Ctrl / ⌘ + A to select all.

Other quality of life updates include:

1. Disable automatic zip extraction so you can host zips.
2. Take advantage of more powerful text positioning options.
3. Serve your own custom 404 images.
4. All variants of a file are instantly purged from our content delivery network (CDN) when the original image is overwritten.
5. Process TIFF files.

Now, let’s dig into the big updates.

Automate Art Direction with Point-of-interest Crop

Sirv uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the most interesting part of an image, and gives you the ability to crop the image accordingly. This allows you to deliver perfect imagery to every customer, on any device, in any orientation, completely on autopilot.

Learn more about point-of-interest crop, and see it in action in our help center.

Face Detection Crop

Again, with the help of AI, Sirv is now able to detect faces in images.

This can be useful in a number of cases, for example:

• Professional looking headshots of key people within your business.
• Avatars of users in your app.
• Clear, close-up shots of a pair of earrings, or a new hairstyle.

Check out the docs and the live demo here.

Autocrop

It’s now possible to automatically crop out excess whitespace from your product images.

See this new feature in action in our help center.

Gain More Control With Color Levels

Every professional photographer knows it’s never as simple as just snapping a shot. There’s always post-production to perform to ensure the images serve their purpose well. And one part of this is adjusting the color levels.

For example:

• Achieving the perfect white background for high contrast images, to show greater clarity of detail, like stitching or fabric textures.
• Dialing up an accent color to make features of a product really pop.
• Overcoming the challenge of presenting black items so they don’t look like a shadow.

Sirv has now made it possible to play around and adjust your color levels without the need of a third-party tool, like Photoshop. And because the levels are amended within Sirv’s image editor, you can apply your changes to an entire 360 spin. Our customers are already finding this to be hugely beneficial to make their imagery pop on screen.

Share Folders with Clients or Partners

Do you do everything in-house? Or do you work with agency partners?

Are you responsible for maintaining a single website? Or are your products posted across several?

Do you need to share product imagery with partners for use on their sites?

You can now easily share the contents of your Sirv folders with people outside of your company. Choose whether people with the link can only view the files, or view and download. Because Sirv is a cloud browser-based platform, as long as your customers or partners can access the Internet, they’ll be able to click and see the contents of your folder and provide instant feedback. Many of our customers are finding this new functionality for getting new products online quicker and supporting richer collaboration.

Visit our Help Center to find out more…

Do you feel that Sirv is missing something important? Let us know…