Cloudinary is a cloud platform and a set of APIs for images and video, made by the company Cloudinary. It handles the whole life of a media file: upload, storage, transformation, optimization and delivery through a CDN (content delivery network, a set of servers around the world that serve files from a place near each viewer).
Files reach Cloudinary through the API or through the Upload widget, a ready-made upload window that a website adds with a couple of lines of code. The widget takes files from the local device, a remote URL, the device camera, social media accounts and stock photo sites, with drag and drop, interactive cropping and a progress display. Cloudinary then transforms the media, for example with smart cropping and generative AI editing, transcodes video for adaptive streaming, and delivers versions optimized for each device. Other products include digital asset management (DAM) with AI tagging and moderation.
Cloudinary is a hosted service. A free plan includes 25 credits a month; paid plans are monthly or yearly subscriptions with more credits and users.