cloudinary

What is cloudinary?

The Cloudinary npm package provides a comprehensive suite of tools for managing and manipulating media assets in the cloud. It allows developers to upload, transform, optimize, and deliver images and videos efficiently.

What are cloudinary's main functionalities?

Upload

This feature allows you to upload images and videos to Cloudinary. The code sample demonstrates how to configure the Cloudinary client and upload an image.

const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2;
cloudinary.config({
  cloud_name: 'your_cloud_name',
  api_key: 'your_api_key',
  api_secret: 'your_api_secret'
});
cloudinary.uploader.upload('path/to/your/image.jpg', function(error, result) {
  console.log(result, error);
});

Transformation

This feature allows you to transform images and videos, such as resizing, cropping, and applying effects. The code sample demonstrates how to generate a URL for a transformed image.

const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2;
cloudinary.config({
  cloud_name: 'your_cloud_name',
  api_key: 'your_api_key',
  api_secret: 'your_api_secret'
});
const url = cloudinary.url('sample.jpg', { width: 300, height: 300, crop: 'fill' });
console.log(url);

Optimization

This feature allows you to optimize images and videos for faster loading times and better performance. The code sample demonstrates how to generate a URL for an optimized image.

const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2;
cloudinary.config({
  cloud_name: 'your_cloud_name',
  api_key: 'your_api_key',
  api_secret: 'your_api_secret'
});
const url = cloudinary.url('sample.jpg', { quality: 'auto', fetch_format: 'auto' });
console.log(url);

Delivery

This feature allows you to deliver images and videos via a CDN. The code sample demonstrates how to generate a URL for delivering an image.

const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2;
cloudinary.config({
  cloud_name: 'your_cloud_name',
  api_key: 'your_api_key',
  api_secret: 'your_api_secret'
});
const url = cloudinary.url('sample.jpg');
console.log(url);

Other packages similar to cloudinary

imgix

Imgix is a service that provides real-time image processing and optimization. It offers similar functionalities to Cloudinary, such as image transformations, optimizations, and delivery via a CDN. However, Imgix focuses more on real-time image processing and URL-based transformations.

filestack-js

Filestack is a service that provides file uploading, transformation, and delivery. It offers functionalities similar to Cloudinary, including file uploads, transformations, and optimizations. Filestack also provides additional features like file picking and storage integration.

imagekit

ImageKit is a service that provides real-time image optimization, transformation, and delivery. It offers similar functionalities to Cloudinary, such as image transformations, optimizations, and delivery via a CDN. ImageKit also focuses on real-time image processing and URL-based transformations.

README

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a cloud service that offers a solution to a web application's entire image management pipeline.

Easily upload images to the cloud. Automatically perform smart image resizing, cropping and conversion without installing any complex software. Integrate Facebook or Twitter profile image extraction in a snap, in any dimension and style to match your website’s graphics requirements. Images are seamlessly delivered through a fast CDN, and much much more.

Cloudinary offers comprehensive APIs and administration capabilities and is easy to integrate with any web application, existing or new.

Cloudinary provides URL and HTTP based APIs that can be easily integrated with any Web development framework.

For Node.js, Cloudinary provides an extension for simplifying the integration even further.

Setup

npm install cloudinary

Try it right away

Sign up for a free account so you can try out image transformations and seamless image delivery through CDN.

Note: Replace demo in all the following examples with your Cloudinary's cloud name.

Accessing an uploaded image with the sample public ID through a CDN:

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/sample.jpg

Generating a 150x100 version of the sample image and downloading it through a CDN:

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_150,h_100,c_fill/sample.jpg

Converting to a 150x100 PNG with rounded corners of 20 pixels:

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_150,h_100,c_fill,r_20/sample.png

For plenty more transformation options, see our image transformations documentation.

Generating a 120x90 thumbnail based on automatic face detection of the Facebook profile picture of Bill Clinton:

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/facebook/c_thumb,g_face,h_90,w_120/billclinton.jpg

For more details, see our documentation for embedding Facebook and Twitter profile pictures.

Usage

Configuration

Each request for building a URL of a remote cloud resource must have the cloud_name parameter set. Each request to our secure APIs (e.g., image uploads, eager sprite generation) must have the api_key and api_secret parameters set. See API, URLs and access identifiers for more details.

Setting the cloud_name, api_key and api_secret parameters can be done either directly in each call to a Cloudinary method, by calling the cloudinary.config(), or by using the CLOUDINARY_URL environment variable.

Embedding and transforming images

Any image uploaded to Cloudinary can be transformed and embedded using powerful view helper methods:

The following example generates the url for accessing an uploaded sample image while transforming it to fill a 100x150 rectangle:

cloudinary.url("sample.jpg", {width: 100, height: 150, crop: "fill"})

Another example, emedding a smaller version of an uploaded image while generating a 90x90 face detection based thumbnail:

cloudinary.url("woman.jpg", {width: 90, height: 90, crop: "thumb", gravity: "face"})

You can provide either a Facebook name or a numeric ID of a Facebook profile or a fan page.

Embedding a Facebook profile to match your graphic design is very simple:

cloudinary.url("billclinton.jpg", {width: 90, height: 130, type: "facebook", crop: "fill", gravity: "north_west"})
                       

Same goes for Twitter:

cloudinary.url("billclinton.jpg", {type: "twitter_name"})

Upload

Assuming you have your Cloudinary configuration parameters defined (cloud_name, api_key, api_secret), uploading to Cloudinary is very simple.

The following example uploads a local JPG to the cloud:

var cloudinary = require('cloudinary')
   
cloudinary.uploader.upload("my_picture.jpg", function(result) { console.log(result) })

Below is an example of an upload's result:

{ public_id: '4srvcynxrf5j87niqcx6w',
  version: 1340625837,
  signature: '01234567890abcdef01234567890abcdef012345',
  width: 200,
  height: 200,
  format: 'jpg',
  resource_type: 'image',
  url: 'http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/v1340625837/4srvcynxrf5j87niqcx6w.jpg',
  secure_url: 'https://d3jpl91pxevbkh.cloudfront.net/demo/image/upload/v1340625837/4srvcynxrf5j87niqcx6w.jpg' } 
    

The uploaded image is assigned a randomly generated public ID. The image is immediately available for download through a CDN:

cloudinary.url("abcfrmo8zul1mafopawefg.jpg")
    
http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/abcfrmo8zul1mafopawefg.jpg

You can also specify your own public ID:

cloudinary.uploader.upload("http://www.example.com/image.jpg", function(result) { console.log(result) }, {public_id: 'sample_remote'})

cloudinary.url("sample_remote.jpg")

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/sample_remote.jpg
    

cloudinary.image

Returns an html image tag pointing to Cloudinary.

Usage:

cloudinary.image("sample", {format: "png", width: 100, height: 100, crop: "fill"})

// <img src='http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/c_fill,h_100,w_100/sample.png' height='100' width='100'/>

Additional resources

Additional resources are available at:

• Website
• Documentation
• Image transformations documentation
• Upload API documentation

Support

You can open an issue through GitHub.

Contact us at [e-mail]

Or via Twitter: @cloudinary

License

Released under the MIT license.