How we deliver galleries faster and better than the competition
Over 70% of users abandon photo galleries that take more than 3 seconds to load.
When a client opens your gallery and waits 1-2 seconds per image (typical for SmugMug), they're not thinking about your photography—they're thinking about how slow your delivery is.
That matters. A lot. Because your clients remember two things: your photos, and how they got them.
We use Cloudinary's enterprise-grade image CDN—the same infrastructure powering Netflix, Spotify, and major media companies.
q_auto:best setting specifically designed for high-quality photography| Feature | khrome | SmugMug | Pixieset | Zenfolio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-CDN delivery | ✅ 3 CDNs | ❌ 1 CDN | ❌ 1 CDN | ❌ Storage-focused |
| Next-gen formats (WebP/AVIF) | ✅ Auto | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Content-aware compression | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Photography-grade quality | ✅ q_auto:best | ⚠️ Generic | ⚠️ Generic | ⚠️ Generic |
| Global edge servers | ✅ Thousands | ⚠️ Hundreds | ⚠️ Hundreds | ⚠️ Variable |
| Typical load time | <3 sec | 1-2 sec/image | Slow uploads | Variable |
*Competitor data based on user reports and public infrastructure disclosures (2025).
Cloudinary has spent 15+ years optimizing image delivery for billions of images. Their multi-CDN architecture, content-aware compression, and photography-grade quality settings (q_auto:best) are specifically designed for high-quality photography. Building this ourselves would take years and millions of dollars—and still wouldn't match their global infrastructure.
Sure—Cloudinary is publicly available. But migration is expensive (millions of images), and most legacy platforms have organizational inertia. More importantly, our competitive advantage isn't just infrastructure—it's product design, UX refinement, and feature integration. Stack transparency builds trust; we're confident in our execution.
Cloudinary's q_auto:best setting uses less aggressive compression algorithms specifically for photography sites. The result is larger file sizes than generic compression, but visually indistinguishable from originals—even at 100% zoom. We've tested this extensively with wedding and portrait photographers; the quality loss is imperceptible.
We measure Time to Interactive (TTI)—the point where your client can start viewing images. This includes DNS lookup, TLS handshake, HTML download, and first contentful paint. Our testing uses real-world networks (3G, 4G, broadband) across major geographic regions (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific). Competitors often report 1-2 seconds per image; we deliver the entire gallery in under 3 seconds total.
Infrastructure is only impressive if it delivers results. Try khrome and feel the difference yourself.