Case Study: Baby’s Firsts achieves fast photo delivery and exact app-to-print consistency with Cloudinary

Cloudinary helps Baby’s Firsts App deliver images quickly and preserve consistency from app to print

Baby’s Firsts is a free iPhone app that helps parents capture, share and print photo albums of their baby’s first year, but its developers faced a backend challenge: they needed scalable storage for high-resolution photos and a reliable way to preserve user edits (cropping, zooming and layout) so pages rendered in the app matched the printed books. Previous use of Amazon S3 made it difficult to re-render images consistently across design and print stages, and building a custom image pipeline in-house would have been time-consuming.

The team adopted Cloudinary’s cloud-based image management to handle uploads, high‑availability storage, on‑the‑fly transformations and revision tracking, serving low-resolution images to the app for speed while saving exact transformed images as unique URLs for print. Since launch Cloudinary has supported rapid growth—about 105,000 downloads, 80,000 profiles, ~8,000 weekly active users (averaging ~8 uploads/week) and over 2.7 million captured moments—delivering faster experiences, consistent print output and reduced development overhead.

Baby’s Firsts

Kevin Bridges

Innovation Leader