A great way to make dynamic images for your website.

While I was researching for a way to add a picture into another picture dynamically on a webpage I discovered a very nice tool.

Cloudinary — Programmable MediaPowerful image and video APIs for editing, hosting, and global content distribution for Websites and Cloud Apps.

What that means and why I say it’s a great tool?

You can initially programmatically upload your photos and then retrieve them into the website with transformations applied to them.

For example.

Uploading a picture is as easy as a fetch request to an URL with the picture into an object slightly formatted. Then receiving a response with all the details, where you find a pictureId. That picture ID can be saved and interpolated into a URL that will apply a style to the recently uploaded image or using an SDK you can add the same style into many programming languages.

With the help of this great tool can be created powerful apps and added very eye-catchy features.

Another great thing about Cloudinary is that it’s a cloud-based system which means it won’t run on your server and will respond pretty fast to all requests.

A problem that I found with Cloudinary while I was using it is the lack of good documentation which sometimes can lead to a lot of time spend changing the URL to obtain the desired result. But once you understand how it works, it’s great! … And another thing is that after 25k transformations pay monthly payment is needed. :-/

Conclusion

If you want to build a small app that dynamically uses images and you have some hours to send in the browser to modify a link, Cloudinary is definitely a tool you need to check.