Programmable Media

Image and video delivery

Last updated: Nov-14-2023

Cloudinary leverages multiple CDNs, including Akamai, the leading CDN provider, with thousands of global delivery servers. Together with Cloudinary's advanced caching techniques and dynamic URL-based image delivery, your resources are efficiently delivered to your users all around the world.

Important note for free accounts:
To reduce the chances of malware or other potentially harmful files being distributed via the Cloudinary domain, the following file formats are, by default, blocked for delivery for FREE accounts:
  • ZIP, RAR, TAGZ, and other archive formats
  • PDF

If you are on a Free plan and need to deliver files in these formats, you can navigate to the Security page of the Console Settings and select to Allow delivery of PDF and ZIP files. Additionally, these delivery limitations are removed when you upgrade to a paid plan.

The pages in this guide describe Cloudinary features that enable you to easily deliver your image and video assets in more optimized and responsive ways, to control who can access assets, as well as other options that make use of transformation parameters without transforming the visual or audio experience for the end user.

Page Description
Deliver remote media files Automatically fetch an image from anywhere on the Web, with on-the-fly transformation and optimized delivery via a CDN.
Social media profile pictures If you use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media profiles for authenticating users to your site or you integrate with social media profiles in your Web application, you can retrieve and display profile pictures from these applications in your site.
Paged and layered media Deliver content from assets with multiple pages or layers such as PDFs or Photoshop files, including options for delivering or transforming only selected pages or layers.
Media access methods Control who can access your media, both the originals and transformed assets.
Sprite generation Sprites, a single image containing many smaller images, are great for reducing network overhead and bypassing download limitations: the browser downloads only a single sprite and CSS code directs the browser to which part of the sprite to use for each contained image. Cloudinary can generate sprites for you based on all images with a specified tag.
Advanced URL delivery options A variety of advanced URL options for delivering your media assets.

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