Image format support

Images can be uploaded to Cloudinary in various formats (input formats), and you can easily convert these images to other formats for displaying in your web site or application (output formats). Examples of situations where you might want to change the delivered image format:

• Delivering JPEG images for photos that you want to load quickly (or AVIF or WebP if your users are on a browser that supports these).
• Delivering a PNG (24 bit) for high quality illustrations with a transparent background.
• Delivering an image where the original format is not supported for delivery by the browser. For example, you could deliver a Photoshop (.psd) image as a JPEG.

Delivering in a different format

You can convert and deliver images in any supported image format by specifying the required format as the file extension of the delivery URL.

To convert an image to a different format:

1. Specify the required format as the file extension in your delivery URL. When using an SDK, you can either append the extension of the new format to the asset's public ID or use the format parameter.

   For example, the following displays the uploaded woman-business-suit JPEG image as a PNG:

   

2. Optionally, combine format conversion with other image transformations. For example, the following delivers the same image as a PNG, but this time removing the background and converting the image to grayscale:

   

To change format when you cannot modify the file extension:

Use the fetch_format transformation parameter (f in URLs). This is useful when fetching remote assets that already have a different file extension (format) as part of their URLs.

For example, the following fetches a remote image from Wikimedia in PNG format, and delivers the image in JPEG format (also scaled down to a width of 400 pixels):

f_auto

You can take advantage of Cloudinary's automatic format selection (f_auto) transformation to automatically deliver images in the most optimized format that's supported by the requesting browser.

For example, if you deliver a JPEG image with f_auto, Cloudinary might generate and deliver the image as a WebP, AVIF or JPEG XL file, depending on the requesting browser and your account setup. The f_auto algorithm will similarly deliver the best format when the original asset is a PNG (with or without transparency), an animated GIF, etc.

For details, see Automatic format selection (f_auto) and Tips and considerations for using f_auto.

Supported image formats

The table below summarizes the supported image formats.