Cloudinary Image & Video release notes: February 2, 2026

We publish Cloudinary Image and Video API release notes periodically to give you a quick overview of all the new features, enhancements, and fixes that we've recently released for Cloudinary developers. When relevant, they may also give sneak previews of upcoming features and/or other share important announcements.

Cloudinary Image

Improved PDF optimization

We've increased the limits and improved the processing flow for optimizing PDFs with automatic quality (q_auto in URLs). Cloudinary can now optimize PDFs with up to 300 pages or 200 MB in size.

If optimization hasn't completed within 30 seconds, Cloudinary returns the original PDF and continues processing for up to another 90 seconds in the background. The original PDF is cached on the CDN for five minutes. Once the cache expires and optimization has completed successfully, subsequent requests return the optimized version.

If processing doesn't complete within 120 seconds, Cloudinary returns the original.

When uploading a PDF with an incoming transformation that includes automatic quality (q_auto), you must set the async parameter to true so that the PDF can be processed in the background.

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Asset and account management

Cloudinary Media Inspector is now GA

The Cloudinary Media Inspector browser extension that many of you know and love has officially graduated from Beta and is now GA, at version 1.0. If you haven't tried it yet, it's an easy way to analyze media assets on any web page in order to identify optimization opportunities, inspect transformations, and debug delivery issues directly from your browser.

The most recent update also adds the ability to view the number of bytes saved when delivering assets from Cloudinary:

• See the bytes saved for each asset as a percentage. Hovering over the value shows you the actual number of bytes saved.

• View the total bytes saved overall, and broken down by images and videos.

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Coming soon

New Studio

We've upgraded the Studio experience to make image transformations feel smarter, more hands-on, and easier to refine.

Key highlights:

• More powerful AI assistance: Use natural language to describe how you want to edit your image. The AI suggests transformations and shows you a preview before you apply them.
• New ways to interact with images: More precise cropping and canvas control, plus the ability to fine-tune AI-powered transformations using refiners.
• A smoother, more responsive experience: A refreshed interface that's faster and more intuitive from start to finish.

With the new Studio, you can build transformations, save them as named transformations and transformation templates, apply them to one or more images, and refine AI-generated versions of images.

This version of the Studio is available for accounts on Assets Free plans that were created after 15 December 2025. It will be rolled out to all customers over the coming weeks.

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Announcements

Cloudinary Moderation

Cloudinary Moderation, our new AI-based product for keeping visual content on-brand, high-quality, and consistent at scale, is available in Beta. Contact Support or your Cloudinary representative to request access.

Cloudinary Moderation uses AI tailored to your visual guidelines to validate assets for brand consistency, quality, and compliance. It functions like a dedicated brand reviewer, ensuring every asset meets your standards before it goes live. By automating what used to be a time-consuming manual task, it creates a scalable, reliable guardrail for teams handling high-volume content across marketing, marketplaces, and UGC flows.

Learn more

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