Image & Video APIs

Image & Video APIs overview

Last updated: May-12-2025

Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media) is a software–as-a-service (SaaS) solution for developers providing APIs that enable you to automate the entire lifecycle of your image and video assets. These APIs include dedicated Cloudinary Image and Cloudinary Video transformation, optimization, and delivery capabilities, as well as cross-media APIs for uploading, managing and analyzing assets, and managing your account.

You can combine these APIs to automate almost any imaginable image or video use-case.

On this page:

Interactive onboarding
Video tutorials
Additional onboarding resources

Key benefits for developers

The Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media) solution offers many features and benefits for managing your media files in the cloud. Some of the main benefits to developers are:

Minimize media-related efforts from your design and creative departments to reduce costs and decrease time-to-market.
Use one-liners from your choice of a variety of frontend, backend or mobile SDK libraries for easy integration within your development framework.
Enjoy cutting-edge, AI-based image, video, and audio transformation features.
Take advantage of the cloud-based Media Library UI and REST APIs for upload, delivery and administration.
Provide your end users with engaging visual experiences that load quickly on every device.

Interactive onboarding

Developer Kickstart

Jump into Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media) with quick hands-on tasks that help you understand the value and get you up and running in your favorite dev environment.

SDK Quick Starts

Try out a step-by-step quick start to help you get a Cloudinary project set up, configured and running in your favorite language, in 5 minutes or less.

Try it: Code Explorers

Play, learn, and get started building your own capabilities in minutes using inline code explorers.

Try it: Interactive Demos

Play, learn, and be inspired to build Cloudinary capabilities into your own apps using interactive feature demos.

Try it: Postman Collections

Discover how to try out and run REST API requests using the Cloudinary Postman collections. You'll find Run in Postman buttons throughout the docs.

Video tutorials

Video Tutorial Library

Browse our library of tutorials to learn about a variety of topics, such as programmatic asset management, transformations and optimizations, and administration.

Asset Management Videos

Watch video tutorials to learn about uploading and delivering assets programmatically, interacting with Cloudinary APIs, configuring and utilizing the SDKs and CLI, and more.

Optimization and Delivery Videos

Watch video tutorials to learn how to optimize and deliver your Cloudinary assets programmatically.

Transformation Videos

Watch video tutorials to learn how to transform your Cloudinary assets, from basic transformations such as resizing and cropping, to more advanced features such as overlays, named transformations, effects and more.

Additional onboarding resources

Service Introduction

Read about the service architecture, asset storage, security, available add-ons, and other details about how the service works at a high-level.

Onboarding FAQ

Browse through the questions most commonly asked by developers who are evaluating or getting started with Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media).

Enterprise Onboarding FAQ

Browse through the questions that large organizations often ask when evaluating or getting started with a Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media) Enterprise Plan.

Migration Guide

Learn about the various ways you can migrate your exiting images and videos to your Cloudinary product environment.

Glossary

Search the glossary for quick definitions of the terms and concepts you should be familiar with to get the most out of Cloudinary Image and Video (Programmable Media).

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Developer kickstart