Different online services, websites and mobile applications have very different image management requirements. Despite the differences, the image management pipeline boils down to the same basic formula - upload the images, normalize them, store them and manipulate them to create derivatives (thumbnails, effects, watermarks, etc.). Afterwards, prepare them for delivery and make sure they are accessible to your users quickly and efficiently when browsing your website or using your mobile app.
When we set out to build Cloudinary, we envisioned a platform that could streamline an online service's entire asset management pipeline needs. We developed a simple yet powerful URL based API and made integration even simpler using client integration libraries for many web dev platforms and programming languages. It was a joy to see how each of our clients found new ways of utilizing our platform, hooking different API calls to solve scenarios we could barely imagine when Cloudinary was first conceived.
In the regular flow of web applications, this works perfectly. But sometimes, you'll want even more fine grained control over your online assets - browse through user uploaded images, find specific images, delete images, delete transformations and more. If you already tried Cloudinary, you probably know that you can use our Management Console for manually achieving such tasks via our web-based user interface. But as many of our customers told us and frequently requested, more control is sometimes required than what they can currently achieve manually.
Today, we've made another important step in making the Cloudinary platform even more customizable.
Without further ado, we'd like to welcome Cloudinary's powerful new administrative API, an intuitive RESTful HTTP API for programmatically managing all of your Cloudinary hosted assets.
Supported Operations
When building the API, we did our best to cover all common management tasks:
- Listing all uploaded images and raw files.
- Receiving details and metadata for uploaded images, including timestamps, format, dimensions, etc.
- Listing the derived images of uploaded images.
- Finding all images that share a given tag.
- Listing all transformations.
- Listing tags.
- Receiving transformation details.
- Creating named transformations.
- Updating an existing transformation.
- Deleting images, raw files, derived images and transformations.
API Overview
The API is accessed using HTTPS to endpoints in the following format:
https://api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/:cloud_name/:action
For example, resource listing of the 'demo' account:
https://api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/demo/resources/images
Authentication is done using Basic Authentication over secure HTTP. Your Cloudinary API Key and API Secret are used for the authentication.
Request parameters are appended to the URL. The response is in a simple JSON snippet. Like any REST API, read-only requests are sent in HTTP GET while write requests are sent in PUT, POST and DELETE.
For more details, check out our documentation page.
Our client libraries provide an easy to use wrapper for this URL-based API, utilizing your native programming language of choice. Request building and authentication are done automatically, and the JSON response is parsed and returned.
Usage Examples
The following Ruby example lists all your Cloudinary hosted images:
$ result = Cloudinary::Api.resources => {"resources"=> [{"public_id"=>"sample1", "format"=>"png", "version"=>1349196740, "resource_type"=>"image", "type"=>"upload", "created_at"=>"2012-10-02T16:52:20Z", "bytes"=>71376, "width"=>261, "height"=>253, "url"=> "https://res.cloudinary.com/sam/image/upload/v1349196740/sample1.png", "secure_url"=> "https://d3jpl91pxevbkh.cloudfront.net/sam/image/upload/v1349196740/sample1.png"}, {"public_id"=>"sample2", "format"=>"png", "version"=>1349196732, "resource_type"=>"image", "type"=>"upload", "created_at"=>"2012-10-02T16:52:12Z", "bytes"=>133171, "width"=>278, "height"=>432, "url"=> "https://res.cloudinary.com/sam/image/upload/v1349196732/sample2.png", "secure_url"=> "https://d3jpl91pxevbkh.cloudfront.net/sam/image/upload/v1349196732/sample2.png"}, ... ], "next_cursor"=>"e39ef944e18cfda7deafa4aea96791e7"}
Here's the same example in PHP:
Python:
And Node.js:
By default, 10 results are returned in a single request. You can specify the max_results parameter if you want more results in a single request. You can use this in conjunction with the next_cursor parameter for paginating through all your assets.
The next example shows how to get the full details of a single uploaded image, including the list of its derived images:
$ result = Cloudinary::Api.resource("sample1") => {"public_id"=>"sample1", "format"=>"png", "version"=>1349196740, "resource_type"=>"image", "type"=>"upload", "created_at"=>"2012-10-02T16:52:20Z", "bytes"=>71376, "width"=>261, "height"=>253, "url"=> "https://res.cloudinary.com/sam/image/upload/v1349196740/sample1.png", "secure_url"=> "https://d3jpl91pxevbkh.cloudfront.net/sam/image/upload/v1349196740/sample1.png", "next_cursor"=>"f329da74de2a9ac9cbf99d2a6bc147b8", "derived"=> [{"transformation"=>"c_fill,h_50,r_20,w_70", "format"=>"png", "bytes"=>7313, "id"=>"a3b44a715c63f7ee91f11fb20b97c5df", "url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_50,r_20,w_70/v1349196740/sample1.png", "secure_url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_50,r_20,w_70/v1349196740/sample1.png"}, {"transformation"=>"c_fill,h_75,w_75/jpg", "format"=>"jpg", "bytes"=>2889, "id"=>"7c0ca85b966b928179ce336fa2a7d1f8", "url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_75,w_75/v1349196740/sample1.jpg", "secure_url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_75,w_75/v1349196740/sample1.jpg"}]}
And now, the same example in PHP:
Python:
And Node.js:
One final example - getting the details of a single transformation, including a list of all images assigned to this transformation:
$ result = Cloudinary::Api.transformation("c_fill,h_75,w_75/jpg") => {"name"=>"c_fill,h_75,w_75/jpg", "allowed_for_strict"=>false, "used"=>true, "info"=>[{"width"=>75, "height"=>75, "format"=>"jpg", "crop"=>"fill"}], "derived"=> [{"public_id"=>"sample1", "resource_type"=>"image", "type"=>"upload", "format"=>"jpg", "url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_75,w_75/v1349196740/sample1.jpg", "secure_url"=> "https://.../sam/image/upload/c_fill,h_75,w_75/sample1/sample1.jpg", "bytes"=>2889, "id"=>"7c0ca85b966b928179ce336fa2a7d1f8"}, ... ]}
As you can see, the new API is quite powerful. Using this API allows for full control of all uploaded raw files and images, fetched social profile pictures, generated transformations and more.
For more examples and a full reference, see our detailed documentation.
Usage Limits
You can use the new API quite extensively. We ask for that you keep your ongoing API requests to 500 per hour (12,000 daily) when using our Free plan. Subscribe to our Basic plan onward to increase the limit to 2000 calls per hour. If you require more flexible limits, don't hesitate to contact us.
For each API call, standard HTTP headers are returned with details on your current usage statistics, including your per-hour limit, remaining number of actions and the time the hourly count will be reset.
Here is how these headers might look like:
X-FeatureRateLimit-Limit: 500
X-FeatureRateLimit-Remaining: 499
X-FeatureRateLimit-Reset: Wed, 03 Oct 2012 08:00:00 GMT
Note that our client libraries provide easy access to the returned limit headers. In Ruby for example:
Summary
The new admin API is available for all our free and paid plans. It would be great if you try it out, and tell us what you think.
We have interesting ideas on how to further enhance this new API. If your want to be in the loop, go ahead and subscribe to our blog or Like Cloudinary on Facebook, and receive our timely updates.
