JVH Art Gallery

A live art gallery platform with real users and years of exhibition/artwork data — but the client reported it as painfully slow and unresponsive. Root cause: API responses were taking 4-5+ seconds or more, driven by two compounding issues — images stored as base64 directly in the database (bloating both storage and every API payload to multiple MBs), and missing/incorrect pagination on data-heavy endpoints.

A full backend performance overhaul — migrated all existing base64 image data out of the database to Cloudinary via a custom migration job, replacing every image field with a lightweight URL reference. Combined with query optimization and correctly implemented pagination, API response times dropped from multiple seconds to milliseconds. The entire migration preserved thousands of existing artworks, exhibitions, and user records with zero data loss, and users were cut over to the new performant backend with only a 4-hour maintenance window.