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Image transformation types
Last updated: Jun-03-2026
There are many different types of image transformations. This page provides an overview of these. The remaining pages in this Image Transformations Guide cover those types in detail.
| Transformation type | Description |
|---|---|
| Resizing and cropping | Resize (crop and/or scale) images server-side before delivering them. |
| Placing layers on images | Place image, text, or other layers on (or under) existing assets to generate new and customized creations on the fly. |
| Effects and enhancements | Apply a huge variety of effects, filters, and other artistic enhancements to any image. |
| Background removal | Use AI to remove image backgrounds. |
| Generative AI transformations | Use generative AI to transform your images, naturally extending dimensions, removing and replacing objects, generating new backgrounds and more. |
| Face-detection based transformations | Transform an image based on detected faces. |
| Custom focus areas | Define and refine custom areas of an image. |
| Transformation refiners | Take control of the finer details of your AI-generated images. |
| Animated image transformations | Create animated images from multiple images in your product environment, convert them to video, convert between animated formats, and apply animation-specific transformations. |
| 3D models | Learn how to perform transformations on 3D models. |
| Conditional transformations | Apply a transformation only if a specified condition is met. |
| User-defined variables and arithmetic transformations | Use arithmetic expressions and variables to add additional sophistication and flexibility to your transformations. |
| Custom functions | Inject a remote, lambda or WebAssembly function and apply the result as a transformation. |
Create new images
In addition to the above types of transformations, Cloudinary also offers the following ways to programmatically generate new images:
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Animated images | Create a single animated image from multiple image assets, where each asset is used as a single frame of the resulting animated image. |
| PDF files from images | Create a PDF from multiple image assets, where each asset is used as a single frame of the resulting PDF file. |
| Images from text | Create an image of a given textual string and customize the look & feel of the resulting image with various font, color and style parameters. |
Note
The above options create new assets in your product environment with their own public IDs, as opposed to asset transformations that get generated (derived) and cached on the CDN, but aren't stored in your product environment as separate assets with their own public IDs.
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