React image and video upload
Last updated: Apr-29-2025
When using the React SDK, you can use one of several options to upload files directly to Cloudinary without the need for server-side operations or authentication signatures.
Upload options
Upload widget
The Upload widget is a ready-made, responsive user interface that enables your users to upload files from a variety of sources directly to Cloudinary. You can customize and embed this UI within your web application with just a few lines of code.
Check out the following Upload Widget code explorer that you can fork to try out some sample configuration changes:
This code is also available in GitHub.
Video tutorial
Watch this video tutorial to see how to integrate the Upload widget into your React app:
This video is brought to you by Cloudinary's video player - embed your own!
Tutorial contents
Upload endpoint
The upload endpoint is https://api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/${cloudName}/upload. To use the endpoint in your application, use the JavaScript Fetch API to call the Cloudinary upload endpoint and pass:
- an unsigned upload preset with the upload method options you want to apply for all files
- the file(s) to upload
- other unsigned upload parameters to apply to the selected files (e.g.
tags, if needed).
- Each of the upload options described above can also be performed as a signed upload, but in this case, an authentication signature must be generated on your backend server. This can be implemented in conjunction with one of Cloudinary's backend SDKs, which implement helpers to automatically generate the authentication signature for the upload.
- If you are using jQuery in your app, you can take advantage of the built-in upload functionality in Cloudinary's jQuery SDK. This solution uses HTML5 cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and gracefully degrades to a seamless iframe based solution for older browsers.
Code examples
- Code sample: Implement the upload widget.
- Code explorer: Upload multiple files using a form in pure JavaScript using the Cloudinary upload endpoint.
- CodePen: Use the JavaScript Fetch API to upload files in vanilla JavaScript using the Cloudinary upload endpoint for unsigned uploading with an upload preset.
- Glitch: Perform signed uploads from the browser by generating a signature on the server.
- Code explorer: React Upload Widget code explorer example implementation of the Upload widget.
- Code explorer: Use chunked POST requests to upload large files from the client side.
- Git sample project: Upload files using the Upload Widget and the REST API in the Photo Album sample project.