Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery

Learn how to use Cloudinary's WordPress Plugin to optimize and manage your media assets effectively.

What is Cloudinary?

Cloudinary’s media experience platform uses AI and automation to optimize the visual workflow. From upload and on-the-fly manipulation to optimization and fast delivery over multiple Content Delivery Networks, you can do it all within the plugin, never leaving the WordPress environment.

Deliver engaging visual experiences by optimizing your site performance and user experience with faster page load times and advanced auto-responsive delivery. Automatically deliver the optimal format and quality of both your images and videos via AI, apply comprehensive image and video manipulations and effects, display assets via an interactive media gallery, and ensure an optimized media experience to any device in any resolution or pixel density.

Utilize Cloudinary’s DAM for advanced search, AI-based tagging, rich media editing, collections, structured metadata, and an intuitive UI as well as our Video and Image APIs for headless DAM functionality, making it much easier to manage all of your media in WordPress.

What are the features and benefits of Cloudinary?

Cloudinary helps you get dynamic visual experiences published faster and dramatically improves performance of media-heavy pages, leading to higher engagement and retention. As web performance becomes increasingly important, users can automatically deliver the optimal format and quality via AI and machine learning all out of the box with no additional configurations needed. Whether your site is focused on eCommerce, Travel & Hospitality or the like, Cloudinary’s WordPress plugin boasts many features allowing you to streamline your visual workflow.

Feature highlights include:

  • Automatically optimize and apply specified global transformations to pre-existing media upon plugin installation as well as all future uploads.
  • Search and browse your media with AI-powered tagging and attributes including file type, size, format, and many other parameters all within the media library.
  • Automatic responsive images for delivery on various devices in different resolutions.
  • Taxonomy level transformations allow users to set transformations by “category” or “tag” and apply these in real time.
  • Transcode, AI crop, apply filters, generate thumbnails, and more with our video transformation capabilities.
  • The most comprehensive array of image and video manipulation capabilities, powered by AI.
  • Ability to display videos using Cloudinary’s video player giving additional features such as bitrate limit, analytics, monetization, and more.
  • Display images and videos via a customizable interactive media gallery.

With a paid tier, you get:

  • Additional Users.
  • Additional Sub-accounts.
  • Higher bandwidth, storage, and transformation limits.

The WP Engine Advantage.

Publish faster
Go from raw images and videos to custom, responsive experiences in minutes by transcoding, resizing, cropping, and adapting media in real-time based on the viewing context.

Optimize performance
Improve engagement with high-performance images and videos by automatically delivering them in the most efficient format, quality, and resolution through content-aware AI algorithms.

Manipulate dynamically
Apply manipulations such as overlays, watermarks, artistic filters, and video editing such as trimming, captioning, adjusting bitrate—on the fly—through a URL-based API.

Deliver anywhere
Accelerate content delivery through multiple CDNs (Akamai, Fastly, and CloudFront) with dynamic switching between providers to select the best-performing network.

Adopt innovation, out of the box
Publish faster by effortlessly adopting new technologies, such as AI and ML, real-time video optimization, auto-responsive product gallery, 360° views, and more.

Maintain a single source of truth
Enable all your teams to collaborate and manage assets with AI-powered tagging and search, structured metadata, and controlled sharing via collections and media portal.

  • An easy-to-navigate dashboard: The intuitive dashboard is easy to navigate, so you can create a story, customize it, and then share it on the open web quickly.
  • Plug-and-play templates: It’s easy to get started with standard page templates that create a beautiful backdrop for personal images, videos, or GIF assets.
  • Access to the WordPress media library: Quickly and easily get your hands on the entire media library from WordPress to enhance your story.

How do you get started with Cloudinary?

Before you install the Cloudinary plugin, make sure you have a Cloudinary account. Sign up for a free plan, starting with generous usage limits and when your requirements grow, you can easily upgrade to a plan that best fits your needs. More pricing information is available here. The Cloudinary WordPress plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress Marketplace. In case you would like to install the plugin manually, you can find the plugin at the Cloudinary GitHub.

About Cloudinary.

Cloudinary’s mission is to empower companies to deliver visual experiences that inspire and connect by unleashing the full potential of their media. With more than 40 billion assets under management and over 7,000 customers worldwide, Cloudinary is the industry standard for developers, creators and marketers looking to upload, store, transform, manage, and deliver images and videos online. As a result, leading brands like Atlassian, Bleacher Report, Grubhub, Hinge, NBC, Mediavine, Peloton, Petco and Under Armour are seeing significant business value in using Cloudinary, including faster time to market, higher user satisfaction and increased engagement and conversions.