PHP image and video upload

Cloudinary provides an API for uploading images, videos, and any other kind of file to Cloudinary. Files uploaded to Cloudinary are stored safely in the cloud with optional secure backups and revision history. Cloudinary's APIs allow secure uploading from your servers, directly from your visitors' browsers or mobile applications, or fetched via remote public URLs.

Cloudinary's PHP Library wraps Cloudinary's upload API and simplifies the integration. PHP methods are available for easily performing PHP image and video uploads to Cloudinary and PHP view helper methods are available for uploading directly from a browser to Cloudinary.

This page covers common usage patterns for PHP image and video upload with Cloudinary.

For details on all available upload functionality, see the Upload guide, and the upload method of the Upload API Reference.

Server-side upload

You can upload images, videos, or any other raw file to Cloudinary from your PHP code. Uploading is done over HTTPS using a secure protocol based on your product envrionment's api_key and api_secret parameters.

PHP image upload

Use the UploadApi class to upload assets to Cloudinary.

The following method of the UploadApi class uploads an image to Cloudinary:

For example, uploading a local image file named 'my_image.jpg':

The file to upload can be specified as a local path, a remote HTTP or HTTPS URL, a whitelisted storage bucket (S3 or Google Storage) URL, a data stream, a base64 data URI, or an FTP URL. For details and code examples of uploading using each of these data source types, see Required upload parameters.

For details on all available upload functionality, see the Upload guide, and the upload method of the Upload API Reference.

PHP video upload

You upload videos in the same way as images. However, with videos, you must specify the resource_type as 'video' within the upload method. The SDK also supports automatically uploading large files to Cloudinary in chunks if the file to upload is larger than a defined chunk_size parameter, by default 20000000 Bytes (= 20 MB).

The following example uploads dog.mp4 to Cloudinary in chunks of 6 MB, and stores it with the public ID dog_closeup. It also performs two eager transformations that resize the video to a square and a small rectangle.

Upload response

By default, uploading is performed synchronously. Once finished, the uploaded image or video is immediately available for transformation and delivery. An upload call returns a Hash with content similar to the following:

The response includes HTTP and HTTPS URLs for accessing the uploaded media asset as well as additional information regarding the uploaded asset: The public ID, resource type, width and height, file format, file size in bytes, a signature for verifying the response and more.

Direct uploading from the browser

The upload sample mentioned above allows your server-side PHP code to upload media assets to Cloudinary. In this flow, if you have a web form that allows your users to upload images or videos, the media file's data is first sent to your server and only then uploaded to Cloudinary.

A more efficient and powerful option is to allow your users to upload images and videos in your client-side code directly from the browser to Cloudinary instead of going through your servers. This method allows for faster uploading and a better user experience. It also reduces load from your servers and reduces the complexity of your PHP applications.

You can upload directly from the browser using signed or unsigned calls to the upload endpoint, as shown in the Upload multiple files using a form examples.

For signed uploads from your client-side code, a secure signature must be generated in your server-side PHP code. You can use the api_sign_request method to generate SHA signatures: