iOS image and video upload

Cloudinary provides support for uploading media directly from your mobile application to your Cloudinary account, without going through your servers first. This method allows for faster uploading and a better user experience. It also reduces load on your servers and reduces the complexity of your applications.

You can also take advantage of upload presets for predefining upload parameters. For details on all the available upload parameters, see the Upload Images and Upload Videos documentation and the Upload method of the Upload API Reference.

For security reasons, mobile applications shouldn't contain your Cloudinary account credentials. You can use a signed upload, but that requires generating an authentication signature on your backend. In most cases, you will probably use unsigned uploads that generally provide all the functionality you need for your mobile application, while restricting upload options that require more security.

Upload method

The upload request is managed by the upload method, which accepts the file to upload as its only parameter. The file can be specified as either a url or data object.

cloudinary.createUploader().upload(url: fileUrl)
// or
cloudinary.createUploader().upload(data: data)

The OS attempts to initiate the upload immediately but the upload may be rescheduled depending on the system's current network, memory and cpu needs. The upload results are dispatched asynchronously and callbacks can be defined per request.

The following simple example uploads an image called imageFile.jpg using the default settings:

let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(url: "imageFile.jpg")

The result of the upload API call is a CLDUploadResult object that provides information about the uploaded image, including the assigned public ID of the image and its URL.

Signed upload

Signed uploads require you to generate an authentication signature on your backend, and as such, iOS signed upload with backend support should be implemented in conjunction with one of Cloudinary's backend frameworks (Java, .NET, etc). The various backend frameworks implement helpers to be used in conjunction with iOS, as well as automatically generate the authentication signature for the upload.

Unsigned upload

Unsigned upload is an option for performing upload without the need to generate a signature on your backend. Unsigned upload options are controlled by an upload preset: to use this feature, you first need to enable unsigned uploading for your Cloudinary account from the Upload Settings page.

An upload preset is used to define which upload options will be applied to media assets that are uploaded unsigned with that preset specified. You can edit the preset at any point in time (or create additional upload presets).

Upload options

You can pass an instance of CLDUploadRequestParams, with any extra parameters you'd want to pass, as part of the upload request. For example, to upload an image called imageFile.jpg using an upload preset called samplePreset:

let params = CLDUploadRequestParams()
    .setUploadPreset("samplePreset")
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: "imageFile.jpg", params: params)

If you want to include more than one upload parameter in the request you can chain them together. For example, to upload an image called dog.jpg, set the publicId to MyDog, and add the tag animal:

let params = CLDUploadRequestParams()
    .setUploadPreset("samplePreset").setPublicId("MyDog").setTags("animal")
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: "dog.jpg", params: params)

Chunked upload

The SDK includes the uploadLarge method which offers more tolerance for network issues. This method uploads a large file to the cloud in chunks, and is required for any files that are larger than 100 MB. By default, the chunk size is set to 20 Megabytes but can be set to as low as 5 Megabytes with the chunkSize parameter. For example, uploading a large video file called myVid.mp4 and setting the chunk size to 6 Megabytes:

let params = CLDUploadRequestParams()
    .setResourseType("video").setUploadPreset("samplePreset")
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().uploadLarge(
    url: "myVid.mp4", params: params, chunkSize: 6 * 1024 * 1024)

Callbacks

You can track the upload progress by passing a progress closure as part of the upload request, that is called periodically during the data transfer. For Example:

let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: fileUrl, uploadPreset: "samplePreset", progress: { (bytes, totalBytes, totalBytesExpected) in
      // Handle progress
    })

You can also handle the response by adding a completionHandler closure to be called once the upload request has finished. For example:

//  pass a closure using the response method 
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: fileUrl, uploadPreset: "samplePreset")
  .response( { response, error in
      // Handle response
  } )

// pass a closure as an additional parameter of the upload method
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: fileUrl, uploadPreset: "samplePreset", { (response, error) in
      // Handle response
  })

// pass a closure as a trailing closure of the upload method
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: fileUrl, uploadPreset: "samplePreset") { (response, error) in
      // Handle response
  }

Preprocess image uploads

You can pass an instance of CLDImagePreprocessChain, with any steps for preprocessing the image before uploading, as part of the upload request. The following types of processing steps are currently available:

For example, to limit an image to a size of 500x500 pixels, make sure that the image is at least 10x10 pixels in size and change the format to PNG with a quality of 70:

let preprocessChain = CLDImagePreprocessChain()
  .addStep(CLDPreprocessHelpers.limit(width: 500, height: 500))
  .addStep(CLDPreprocessHelpers.dimensionsValidator(minWidth: 10, maxWidth: 500, minHeight: 10, maxHeight: 500)
  .setEncoder(CLDPreprocessHelpers.customImageEncoder(format: EncodingFormat.PNG, quality: 70))
let request = cloudinary.createUploader().upload(
    url: file, uploadPreset: "samplePreset", preprocessChain: preprocessChain)
  .response({ (response, error) in
      // handle response
  })