Service overview

Before you dive into the details of Cloudinary's many asset management features and begin adding Cloudinary code to your application, we recommend that you review this page to gain a high-level understanding about the service architecture, asset storage, security, and other details about how the Cloudinary service works.

Service architecture

Cloudinary's media asset management solution includes:

• High performance servers behind Elastic Load Balancers that support fast upload and download rates.
• Highly available storage that promises that your assets are always available and safe.
• High performance media processing servers for generating your requested images and videos.

By default, resources are stored in Amazon S3 buckets that are privately accessed for writing. These can be shared buckets, dedicated buckets or private buckets.

Delivery lifecycle

The resource delivery lifecycle consists of 5 stages: Upload, Storage, Administration, Manipulation, and Delivery.

Once the original resource has been uploaded to your Cloudinary account, you can administer the resource via secured APIs or the Management Console, and embed dynamic resource URLs in your web page to deliver various versions of the original resource. The dynamic URLs include instructions on how to manipulate (or transform) the resource before delivery.

The first time a transformed resource is requested via a dynamic delivery URL:

1. The resource is requested by the user's browser.
2. The resource request reaches the closest CDN edge server.
3. The CDN edge servers checks if the resource is cached - it is not.
4. The CDN edge server requests the resource from Cloudinary.
5. Cloudinary generates the transformed resource as per the dynamic URL instructions.
6. Cloudinary returns the resource to the CDN edge server.
7. The CDN edge server caches the image and then returns the image to the user's browser.

Subsequent requests for the transformed resource via the same dynamic delivery URL:

1. The resource is requested by the user's browser.
2. The resource request reaches the closest CDN edge server.
3. The CDN edge servers checks if the resource is cached - it is.
4. The CDN edge server returns the image to the user's browser.

For a complete reference of possible transformations see Image transformations and Video transformations.

Scaling

Cloudinary’s architecture was built from the ground up to support high load and handle a practically unlimited amount of resources and usage. Cloudinary’s service includes a multitude of powerful cloud-based upload and transformation servers, with each server optimized to handle a very high rate of uploads, downloads, and complex image transformations. Cloudinary’s servers also automatically scale to easily manage large traffic peaks with advanced load balancers that are used to distribute the load between all our servers. Finally, an enterprise-grade content delivery network delivers resources quickly and efficiently through thousands of global delivery servers.

Security

Cloudinary's secure and safe cloud-based solution is accessible via secure and authenticated HTTPS APIs, with flexible access key provisioning. Cloudinary's security features include:

• Automatic backup of resources to a secondary protected location.
• Complete resource access control.
• Restricted access to resources based on specific transformations, file types and referral sites via the Cloudinary Management Console Security settings.
• Authenticated image access with signed URLs.
• Access control with multiple user roles and permissions, leveraging two-factor authentication via the Cloudinary Management Console User settings.

Storage

Resources uploaded to Cloudinary and all generated resources are safely stored and managed by Cloudinary on high-performance servers that support fast upload and download rates.

By default, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is leveraged for resource management and resources are stored in S3 buckets that are privately accessed for writing. These can be shared buckets, dedicated buckets or private buckets.

Google Cloud Storage is also available for primary and/or backup storage. This is a premium feature that requires a special setup. For more information, contact customer support.

Cloudinary APIs

Cloudinary offers 3 different APIs for uploading, administering and delivering your resources as follows:

• Upload API - methods for uploading resources, creating new resources such as text images, ZIP files and sprites, and manipulating existing resources.
• Admin API - A secure API with methods for browsing, deleting, and restoring existing resources, and for managing upload presets, upload mappings, and transformations.
• URL API - a URL based API for delivering resources. Includes dynamic resource transformations, fetching remote images, and optimizing delivery of the resources. Resource URLs are dynamically mapped to CDN distributions that forward the requests to Cloudinary servers which generate the transformed resource on-demand and deliver them optimized to users.

URLs and endpoints

The URLs for accessing Cloudinary are based on your cloud name, and you can access your public web resources using dynamic URLs. The full URLs of the images or videos you deliver include various parts including the name of the asset, its version and transformation settings. However, all your delivery URLs use the same base URLs. You can view your base URLs and some sample URLs in the Account Details section in the Management Console.

The base URL will also include your cloud name. For example, if your cloud name is 'demo', the base URLs will be:

• 'api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/demo/' - the base URL for accessing Cloudinary's secure API.
• 'https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/' - the base URL for Cloudinary's shared CDN Distribution (all Plans).
• 'https://demo-res.cloudinary.com/' - the base URL for a private CDN Distribution (Advanced Plan and above only).

Building full URLs for accessing your assets is done automatically if you are using our SDKs. However, you can also build these URLs manually. For example, if your cloud name is 'demo' and you want to deliver the uploaded 'sample.jpg' file, simply point to:

This means that in your HTML code you can simply add the following tag:

<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/sample.jpg" />

For more information and details on constructing dynamic URLs see Delivering images using dynamic URLs.

Management console

Cloudinary's web-based management console is used to administer your Cloudinary account. The console includes the following features:

• Dashboard: View details about your account and the usage status of resources, transformations, storage, bandwidth and add-ons.
  Watch the Dashboard intro video tutorial to learn more.
• Media library: Browse and search through your resources, moderate your images, upload new resources, organize and tag your resources, generate transformations, and much more.
  Watch the Media Library intro video tutorial to learn more.
• Transformations: Manage transformations created for your images (view, create, edit, delete) and enable/disable dynamic application of each transformation (with strict transformations enabled).
• Reports: Get insight on your resources with usage reports, in-depth analytics and advice.
• Add-ons: Manage Cloudinary's add-ons for your account.
• Settings: Manage your account, upload, security and user settings. These settings allow you to control and tweak almost every aspect of your resource pipeline's behavior.

Add-ons

You can enhance your images and videos even further with powerful functionality offered by our vision and image processing partners. The add-ons are simple to use and fully integrated into Cloudinary's image and video management pipeline.

For example, Cloudinary offers add-ons that apply auto-tagging, automated asset moderation or anti-malware protection, AI, deep-learning and other analysis algorithms, face detection or recognition, or a variety of special transformation capablities.

Nearly add-ons offer a free tier that you can try regardless of your plan. For details on all available add-ons, see Cloudinary Add-ons.

Transformation counts

Your account's pricing plan is in part dependent on the total number of transformations performed during a billing cycle. These are primarily counted when Cloudinary generates a new 'derived' resource from an asset based on a transformation URL (regardless of the complexity of the transformation).

You may intentionally generate some 'derived' resources in advance using eager transformations so that they will be immediately available upon request. Otherwise, a derived resource is generated on-the-fly (and counted) when the transformation URL is requested for the first time.

In general:

• Since transformations are counted when a new derived resource is generated, multiple requests to the identical transformation URL do not affect transformation counts.
• A single derived resource counts as one transformation regardless of the number of transformation parameters in the transformation URL, or the number of transformation components if it is a chained transformation.
• The initial upload of each asset (with or without an incoming transformation) also counts as one transformation.

Multiple transformation counts

In the following scenarios, what might seem like a single transformation could actually be counted as multiple transformations:

• Some URLs or API commands result in both an initial upload and a transformation, and thus result in two (or more) transformations being counted. These include:
  • Fetch - When you fetch a remote URL or social media profile images, the asset is also uploaded to Cloudinary (the first time it is requested) for caching purposes. If your fetch URL also includes transformations, the initial request to the URL will be counted as two transformations. Furthermore, if a fetched image is set up to refresh at some interval, then each time Cloudinary detects a change in the remote asset and updates the locally cached version accordingly, the newly fetched file and any newly derived resources of that file are counted as additional transformations.
  • Auto-upload - Auto-upload is much like uploading any other file, except that the upload occurs only when a URL is first requested. Thus the initial upload counts as a transformation. If the auto-upload URL also includes transformations, a derived resource is generated in addition to the uploaded file, resulting in a second transformation.
• If two (or more) transformations generate an identical result, but the URL is different in any way - for example, the transformations are in a different order, or you use a transformation that has no impact (for example angle = 0), a separate transformed (derived) resource is created when each of those transformations is requested.
• If you perform an Upload API or Admin API operation that changes or replaces the original asset, then the stored derived resources for that asset are deleted. This means that the next time a corresponding transformation URL is requested, a new derived resource is generated based on the updated asset. A few examples of methods that cause this behavior include: Upload, Explicit, Tags, Context, Update, Delete
• Similarly, if you modify assets in the Media Library, such as renaming or adding/modifying tags or metadata, this also deletes any derived resources that depended on those values (such as a conditional transformation with a text overlay based on a tag value), and new ones will be generated when a transformation URL on that asset is requested.
• When you use the Media Library Edit UI in the management console to experiment with transformations, a new derived resource is generated each time you refresh the preview.
• Some auto transformation parameters have the potential to generate multiple derived resources, depending on the browser, device, or viewing size being used when the URL is requested. Each time a new derived resource is generated, it counts as another transformation. For example:
  • Auto format delivers images in the optimal format for the requesting browser, so if a transformation URL including f_auto is requested on different types of browsers, that same URL may result in multiple derived images in different formats (for example a single URL may result in three derived images in different formats: WebP, jpg, and jpeg-xr).
  • Auto DPR automatically delivers an image using the best DPR for the requesting device. So the single URL may, for example, result in two derived images, one using dpr_1, and one using dpr_2.
  • Auto Width automatically resizes the image to match the width available for the image in the responsive layout. When you use this parameter, the number of potential derived images depends on the screen or viewport size of the requesting devices and the breakpoints you set. Using this parameter might sometimes result in only two or three different derived images, or in other cases, may result in 20 or more images.
    

• Transformation on videos, animated images, and other files with multiple frames or 'pages', such as TIFF, PDFs, or Photoshop images with layers, are actually applied to each page or frame.

  • Initial upload of any of these file types (as with any uploaded file) count only as a single transformation regardless of its size.
  • Derived resources for these asset types are counted as follows:
    • PDFs, TIFFs, PSDs, or other 'paged' files: one transformation plus an additional transformation for every 10 pages.
    • Animated images: one transformation plus an additional transformation for every 10 frames.
    • Animated images converted to video: one transformation for every five frames.
    • SD Video (less than or equal to 921,600 total pixels, e.g., 1280 x 720):
      two transformations for every second.
    • HD Video: (more than 921,600 total pixels, regardless of the exact dimensions):
      four transformations for every second.

• Metadata extraction (For example, use of the image_metadata parameter on an Upload or Explicit method call) is also counted as a transformation.

Additional resources

• Support Knowledge Base
• Blog
• Cookbook
• Facebook Community
• The Visual Web