Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery

Description

Cloudinary’s award-winning plugin makes automating your image, video, and rich media workflow easy, offering a variety of features. From media upload to image optimization, video transcoding and manipulation through delivery via global CDNs, everything is offered from within the plugin.

Optimize your site performance and user experience with faster page load times, advanced auto-responsive delivery, and better visual experience. Automate image quality and video encoding settings, scale and crop images using AI to focus on the most important region, apply comprehensive video and image manipulations and effects, display assets via an interactive media gallery, and deliver optimized media experiences to any device in any resolution or pixel density.

And with advanced digital asset management capabilities available in the plugin, you won’t need to leave your WordPress environment. Take full advantage of 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.

Requirements

  • All you need to get started is to register for a free Cloudinary account to use the plugin and start uploading your media to the cloud.
  • As your site’s media management needs grow, you have the choice to easily upgrade to higher usage plans with practically limitless scale.

Highlights

  • 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 (beta).

Simple Integration

  • Upload and manage your assets with Cloudinary directly from your WordPress interface.
  • Migrate all your locally hosted assets to Cloudinary.
  • Move your existing posts’ images and videos to Cloudinary with a single click.

About Cloudinary

Contributors & Developers

“Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery” is an open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin:
Cloudinary
XWP
Automattic

Screenshots

  • Streamline Your Creative Workflow
  • Media Editor
  • Media Library
  • Easy Generation of Asset Derivatives
  • Global Image Transformation Settings
  • Global Video Transformation Settings
  • Folder and Syncing Settings
  • Track Your Cloudinary Account Status
  • Use Interactive Media Gallery

Installation

Install from within wordpress

  • Visit the plugins page within your dashboard and select Add New.
  • Search for Cloudinary.
  • Select “Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery” from the list.
  • Activate Cloudinary from your Plugins page.
  • Go to Setting up below.

Install Cloudinary manually

  • Upload the Cloudinary folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  • Activate the Cloudinary plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
  • Go to Setting up below.

Setting up

  • Once the plugin is activated, go to the Cloudinary settings.
  • You’ll be prompted to “Add your Cloudinary URL”.
  • Enter your “Cloudinary environment variable URL”, the format should be cloudinary://{API_Key}:{API_Secret}@{Cloud_Name} and can be found in the “Account Details” section of the Cloudinary Console Dashboard, then click save.
  • After saving, additional settings tabs will be available.

Note
If you have two factor authentication configured for your account, you will need to open the Cloudinary Console and login before you can use the Cloudinary plugin.
Your site is now setup to start using Cloudinary.

FAQ

Upgrade from v1

Once installing the new version of the plugin, the plugin will automatically upgrade all of your assets to work with the new plugin.
Upgrade is seamless and requires no action from your side.

Does the plugin sync all of my media to Cloudinary?

The plugin will automatically sync all of your WordPress media to your Cloudinary account and start delivering assets from Cloudinary.
Your assets in the WP storage will remain intact.

Where can I find more info?

You can read the plugin documentation

Compatibility with other Plugins/Themes

The following plugins/themes/page-builders might not be fully compatible with the Cloudinary plugin and advised to be tested side-by-side before enabling in production.

  • Divi
  • Elementor
  • WPBakery
  • Goodlayers
  • Leopard
  • Cube Portfolio
  • Smush

Reviews

January 23, 2021
It's all just great! there is plenty of space to save your media, images, videos, documents. The media are published through their cdn. And the free plan is large enough for personal blogs like mine.
December 18, 2020
Quite happy with Cloudinary. This plugin is a huge step up from what I was using, pre- April 2020. The quality of support I've received, while on a Free account is amazing. We just stepped up to the lowest level of paid account, since there are some slightly increased capabilities available. Also... needed the extra 'headroom' to provide more optimal, video, while saving on bandwidth. If your only streaming experience is posting Youtube or Vimeo links on your site, or merely uploading videos to a shared hosting account, there will definitely be a learning curve, but it's well worth it... Especially given the outstanding and patient support. Also, they respond very quickly... I guess they have support people worldwide. Finally started to stream with their player, rather than just using the template-provided player. The performance is better than I was expecting. Starts to play quickly, even without utilizing their adaptive bitrate streaming feature yet. TLDR; if you want superior streaming performance, and you have the patience for a well-supported medium learning curve, (presuming you're new to CDN streaming), you might not find a better free option that will allow you to grow, inexpensively, when you're ready to do so.
May 11, 2020
I updated the plugin and it uploaded all my images but it isn't applying any transformation and in a few hours my hole credits got used because of the lack of transformations. I have deactivated, cleaned database and instaled again but nothing.
April 2, 2020
I have installed this plugin on 3 of my sites. Really cool. site loads much faster, Images looks the same with much samller size - wow! I was looking for a long time for a plugin that would shrink my images - great one!
Read all 33 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

2.5.0 (20 Jan 2021)

New Features:

  • Brand new user interface!
  • Introducing the Cloudinary Product Gallery (beta feature):
    • We added a new ‘Cloudinary Gallery’ block to the Gutenberg Editor
    • When using WooCommerce, you can now use the ‘Cloudinary Gallery’ as your default product gallery
  • Added a rate-us link. Please rate us! 😉
  • Added support for conditional transformations

Fixes and improvements:

  • Improve the REST API capabilities for better integrability
  • Bug fixes

2.4.1 (07 Jan 2021)

Fixes and improvements:

  • Improved server calling efficiency
  • More fixes

2.4.0 (10 Nov 2020)

New Features:

  • Added breakpoints support for featured images
  • Global transformations on both Categories and Tags pages are now collapsible
  • On plugin deactivation, we will ask you to share with us the reason. It’s important to us 🙂

Fixes and improvements:

  • Fixed an issue with syncing a deleted asset
  • Improved the mechanism for removing the Cloudinary account
  • The warning message for exceeding the annual unit plan was revised
  • Improved the Alt text synchronization from Cloudinary to WordPress
  • Fixed WPBakery error when inserting an image by the WordPress editor
  • Fixed AMP plugin conflict issue

2.3.0 (05 Oct 2020)

New Features:

  • Added a poster image for video asset

Fixes and improvements:

  • Re-sync assets to user specified folder instead of root
  • Store the original uploaded image to cloudinary
  • Fixed ‘Resource not found’ error when changing credentials
  • Fixed incompatibility with text media block

2.2.1 (30 Sep 2020)

Fixes and Improvements:

  • Fixed an error when toggling ‘featured image overwrite’ on a custom post type

2.2.0 (08 Sep 2020)

New Features:

  • You can now off-load all assets from WordPress to Cloudinary!!
  • Automatically convert unsupported media file types (such as INDD, PSD, TIFF, etc) to WordPress supported file types
  • Synchronization mechanism was re-built and now exposes a more granular status updates
  • Lazy load polyfills for outdated browsers
  • Add the ability to overwrite the global transformation to a feature image
  • High quota usage alert is now dismissible
  • Updated Cloudinary brand

Fixes and Improvements:

  • Sync tab UI improvements
  • Various performance improvements
  • Fixed an issues where excessive transformations being created due to breakpoints not disabling
  • Sync assets to allow for unique naming, to prevent overwriting existing items

2.1.9 (04 Aug 2020)

Fixes and Improvements:

  • Upgraded the Cloudinary video version
  • Added two new synced icons: Downloading and Syncing meta data
  • Minor UI improvements
  • Bug fixes:
    • Fixed the $wpsize_!_cld_full! param that can be observed in the Cloudinary URL
    • Fixed wrong calculation of quota credits vs percentage
    • Fixed Upload error on files over 100mb from the previous version
    • Fixed the Ability of Changing the Public Id
    • Fixed Interaction with code blocks with filters that might cause “invalid content”
    • Fixed Overwrite transformations on videos
    • Fixed excessive backslash stripping

2.1.2 (09 Jun 2020)

Fixes and Improvements:

  • Fixed cases where the image size were added to the URL.
  • Added support to dashes (‘-‘) in the connection string.
  • Added an option to re-sync a single asset to Cloudinary.

2.1.1 (01 Jun 2020)

New features:

  • We now provide several options for the WPCloudinary sync, allowing you to better control your media:
    • Bulk-sync – Will sync all assets with Cloudinary in a click-of-a-button.
    • Auto-sync – Will sync new uploaded assets in an on-demand manner.
    • Manual – Added a push to Cloudinary button to the Media Library bulk actions that allows syncing selected assets to Cloudinary.
  • Global Transformations are now being applied to Featured Images.
  • Added an Account Status to the dashboard tab, displaying the account usage, quota and metrics.

Fixes and Improvements:

  • Improved the sync mechanism.
  • General bug fixes and performance improvements.
  • Improved error handling.

2.0.3 (03 Apr 2020)

  • Fix migration issue

2.0.0 (31 Mar 2020)

  • Release of a new major version of the plugin