Your one-stop shop for everything images.
July 23, 2019
Your one-stop shop for everything images.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cloudinary
Cloudinary is being used by the product team to serve up all of the images for our website. On occasions, we also use it as a more general repository for files that need to be served up to clients. Properly handling and serving up Images can be one of the most time-consuming things a product can have, especially one that is more visually focused. There are many elements that need to be taken care of ranging from the size of the photos to their speedy delivery, which is made fairly effortless by Cloudinary.
- Cloudinary gives you the ability to transform your images whichever way you need. It comes loaded with filters, size optimizations, and formatting options. This makes it extremely powerful in that you can apply all of these things with just a few commands and without having to do anything special with the image prior to uploading.
- Cloudinary works either by allowing you to save the images in an S3 bucket, for example, or by saving it in their optimized CDN. After trying the former on a prior project, we switched to the latter and haven't looked back. Pretty much zero downtime and speedy delivery of assets.
- With their built-in viewer, you can dig a little deeper into your assets and also come up with your own organizational structure to more easily keep track of them.
- Their documentation really helps understand the multitude of features that are available.
- Their biggest strength is also one of their weaknesses. There is SO much in terms of features and things you can do, that I feel we probably only use about half of what's possible. Organizing all of those features and making you aware of them can be a challenge, despite their good documentation.
- Their plans can be a bit confusing to calculate since they're based on several quotas on different categories like bandwidth, storage, and transformations. To their credit, they're fairly flexible and allow you to easily upgrade or downgrade plans on demand.
- Images are essential to our product and using Cloudinary has allowed us to serve them up in a cost-effective and efficient way. Not having to worry about your images frees you up to tackle the real challenges for your product.