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Image optimization and delivery
Last updated: Jul-28-2026
Cloudinary leverages multiple leading CDNs, including Akamai, Fastly, and Cloudflare, 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.
Assets are delivered to your end user using URLs with the same structure as transformation URLs. If you don't include a transformation component, then you just deliver the originally uploaded asset as is. However, it's usually not recommended to deliver original assets - it's better to optimize their delivery to improve the end-user's experience.
In this guide you'll learn about optimization, responsive images, and a variety of other delivery and CDN features that enable you to deliver assets in ways that give more value (compared to originals), but without changing their visual experience.
- ZIP, RAR, TAGZ, and other archive formats
If you are on a Free plan and need to deliver files in these formats, you can enable Allow delivery of PDF and ZIP files in the Product environment Security settings. Additionally, these delivery limitations are removed when you upgrade to a paid plan.
If a blocked URL was requested before enabling the setting, the CDN or browser may have cached the error. After enabling, wait for cache expiry or invalidate the CDN. See Invalidate cached assets.
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 |
|---|---|
| Optimization overview | Get a high-level overview of the available optimization options and how they can impact your Core Web Vitals score. |
| Image optimization | Learn the best practices for image optimization, and, if you want to go deeper, explore all the available options for fine-tuning the quality, format, and size of your images to reduce the bytes delivered while ensuring the optimal visual experience. |
| PDF optimization | Apply optimal compression to PDFs without affecting visual quality. |
| Optimize by default | For customers on specific account plans, apply default optimizations when delivering images and videos. |
| Responsive images | Ensure the image sizes that you're delivering adapt to the viewport size, orientation, and resolution of the viewing device for optimal user experience across different devices and screen sizes. |
| Deliver remote media files | Automatically fetch an image from anywhere on the web, including social media profile pictures, with on-the-fly transformation and optimized delivery via a CDN. |
| PDF and Photoshop files | 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. |
| CDN delivery options | Customize your content delivery strategies based on your technical requirements and preferences. |
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