Getting started with Cloudinary in Node.js (video tutorial)

Overview

Learn to get started with Cloudinary in a Node.js app. This tutorial covers setting up, configuring, and optimizing images using the Cloudinary Node.js SDK.

Video tutorial

Tutorial contents

This tutorial presents the following topics. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

Introduction to Cloudinary

0:00	Discover the power of Cloudinary, a platform for image and video management that goes beyond simple uploads. Learn about features like background removal, dynamic cropping, resizing, and AI-driven content analysis in a Node.js app.

Set up Cloudinary

0:24	Install the Cloudinary Node.js SDK using your preferred package manager e.g., npm install cloudinary. Import Cloudinary using const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2. Configure your account using cloudinary.config(), where you’ll input your cloud_name, api_key, and api_secret. Learn how to find these credentials in your Cloudinary dashboard.

Deliver an image from Cloudinary

1:40	You can look for an image to deliver in your Media Library. There are some pre-uploaded ones or you can upload your own. Copy the public ID of the image to use in your script. Use the cloudinary.url() method to generate the delivery URL from the public ID.

Transform an image

2:30	To transform an image, add a second argument, transformation, to the url method, specifying different transformations. For example, fetch_format: 'auto' delivers the best format based on the browser, quality: 'auto' compresses the image as much as possible without visual impact, and width:1200 resizes the image on the server side, reducing the number of bytes to deliver.

Upload an image programmatically

4:16	To upload an image programmatically, you need to configure your API key and secret. Use environment variables to store these, as you shouldn't expose your API secret to anyone. Then you can use the cloudinary.uploader.upload() method to upload an image. For example, uploading a local image:

Transform the uploaded image

7:08	In the same function, use the cloudinary.url() method as before, but with results.public_id instead of the hard coded public ID. For example:

Take a look at these code examples:

• Applying transformations in Node.js
• Uploading images in Node.js

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