Cloudinary Blog
cloudinary.com · Company blog · on HN since 2012
Cloudinary's engineers write about image and video delivery and image codecs, with many posts on JPEG XL and compression comparisons.
What HN saysCommenters mostly recommend the Cloudinary service itself as an image hosting and processing tool, praising its features, free tier and page speed help.
103HN people shared it
85linked it in comments
155stories submitted
1.7Kstory points
5 months agolast shared
2012people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Cloudinary - Upload images to the cloud with RESTful APIs21 people · 4 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 2How JPEG XL compares to other image codecs13 people · 156 points · first shared 2020 · 71 comments on HN
- 3The case for JPEG XL10 people · 391 points · first shared 2022 · 209 comments on HN
- 4Contemplating Codec Comparisons10 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 5JPEG XL and the Pareto Front9 people · 520 points · first shared 2024 · 319 comments on HN
- 6Time for next gen codecs to dethrone jpeg9 people · first shared 2021
- 7JPEG XL: How It Started, How It’s Going6 people · 39 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8What to focus on in image compression fidelity or appeal4 people · first shared 2021
- 9How many bytes do you need for one single pixel?3 people · 22 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 10FLIF, the new lossless image format that outperforms PNG, WebP and BPG3 people · 10 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Introducing fuif responsive images by design3 people · first shared 2019
- 12Cid223 people · first shared 2023
- 13How do various formats (PNG,GIF,JPEG,) compress a blank image?2 people · 26 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 14Cellular Automata images compressed to ridiculously small FLIF files2 people · 9 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15A Closer Look at Guetzli2 people · 9 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
aloftin · 2018-03-24
Cloudinary is this exactly. It’s great! https://cloudinary.com/
kevinflo · 2017-07-09
We've had an excellent experience with http://cloudinary.com/ for pretty much what you describe.
ikennachifo · 2017-06-24
With this recent addition(https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com) to tools you can use, Cloudinary(http://cloudinary.com) is hands down the best for me, In all the time I've been using it, It usually has a way of meeting all my needs. I'm obsessed with page speeds and Optimization, like I have sleepless nights optimizing, but since using Cloudinary, I can sleep well on some nights now. And No! I don't work there, but bless the people that work there.
manigandham · 2015-08-13
http://cloudinary.com is the best at this. Just look at their customers list. They also handle video just as seamlessly and have a pretty generous free tier with a great control panel and useful manipulations (like recognizing faces). We've been using them for a while and everything has been perfect.
http://rsz.io/ is another great service that's free.
You can use your own CDN in front of both to save costs and use your own bandwidth.
cscharenberg · 2015-07-28
Looks very similar to Cloudinary (http://cloudinary.com) which I use for my startup. The pricing at lower end of images looks better for Imgix but doesn't scale as well. Still, I think cloud-hosted image processing is a great service and I'm glad there is competition in it. It let us skip huge amounts of dev work related to constructing image pipelines and organizing assets: we pay $40 (plus more for some addons) and get a massive image layer. Imgix, Cloudinary, and others let you focus on the unique parts of your own software at a really good price.
sebslomski · 2013-08-29
I was looking for something like that (hosted) yesterday and I stumbled upon cloudinary[1].
The do the resizing part for you as well as the hosting.
But the best thing they offer is face recognition. It's incredible! I haven't been in live with a service since guthub.
Their free tier is probably enough for smaller projects (but without backups in your S3 bucket)
Thumbnails with focus on the face looks fantastic!
[1] http://cloudinary.com/invites/lpov9zyyucivvxsnalc5/bwrrdazeh7ebeztqhkx… (affiliate link. Without: http://cloudinary.com)
eviks · 2025-11-23
> AV2 .... further improve the image compression. ( Edit: Also worth pointing out current JPEG-XL encoder is no where near its maximum potential in terms of quality / compression ratio
But at what cost? From this the en/decoding speed (links below) is much higher for those advanced video codecs, so for various lower powered devices they wouldn't be very suitable?
Also, can we expect "near max potential" with AV2/near future or is it an ever-unachievable goal that shouldn't stop adding "non-max" codecs?
https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/image/upload/w_700,c_f…
https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg
jonsneyers · 2024-09-20
Last time I tested, libjxl e1 had a better compression ratio than default libpng, while being two orders of magnitude faster. See https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front#the_pareto_fr…
The point of reference here is not PNG but lossless JPEG, which was the best available option in DNG before version 1.7 of the DNG spec. Lossless JPEG compresses worse (but faster) than PNG.
I don't know how HALIC works but if there is no FOSS implementation available that seems like a no-go.
JyrkiAlakuijala · 2024-03-01
Ideally one would use human ratings.
The author of the blog post did exactly that in a previous blog post:
https://cloudinary.com/labs/cid22/plots
Human ratings are expensive and clumsy so people often use computed aka objective metrics, too.
The best OSS metrics today are butteraugli, dssim and simulacra. The author is using one of them. None of the codecs was optimized for that metrics except jpegli partially.
samwillis · 2022-11-22
The WASM is only 311kb, so for an image heavy site this can easily be offset by the savings on image sizes. It seems quite quick too, are there any benchmarks?
There isn't any source in the repository for the WASM, thats slightly worrying as it's difficult to confirm the Apache License realy applies. I assume you are using an existing JPEG XL decoding lib?
(Edit - Source here: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/tree/dev/codecs/jxl/dec)
Are you doing any progressive decoding while it downloads? I believe that is one of the features of JPEG XL.
Anyone wanting a good overview of JPEG XL, there is a good one here: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs
Aside: This is a great example of how awesome Mutation Observers are, they are the foundation of so many nice new "minimal" front end tools like HTMX and Alpine.js.
colbyfayock · 2022-10-17
Colby from Cloudinary here what framework / tooling are you using? Sorry you haven't had a great experience with the UI, but if you stick around with Cloudinary, I would suspect there's a lot of solutions where the processing / uploading can be automated, such as using a Cloudinary plugin within a headless CMS (like Contentful) where you just use a URL or plugins like the Gatsby plugin: https://github.com/cloudinary-devs/gatsby-transformer-cloudinary (only supports images so far)
If you're on the Netlify side of things, I have a plugin there that automates images https://github.com/colbyfayock/netlify-plugin-cloudinary/
There's a ton others too:
https://cloudinary.com/documentation/cms_ecommerce_integrations
https://cloudinary.com/documentation/partner_built
Hope that helps, happy to brainstorm other ideas as well!
evolve2k · 2022-03-07
We use Cloudinary. All images are served over their CDN network and it's free on their smaller teir. They also have an adaquate User Interface so you can drag and drop images etc.
Free teir offers up to 25GB of net viewing bandwidth. Plenty for what ur doing.
https://cloudinary.com
yboris · 2021-10-05
Unlike preceding formats that tried to replace JPEG, this one was designed with the replacement challenges in mind.
A great blog post on this by one of the creators of the format, Jon Sneyers:
https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg
xeeeeeeeeeeenu · 2021-01-10
Here's a great article on the topic from one of the JPEG XL creators: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs
ksec · 2020-06-23
In my opinion, the true contender to JPEG is JPEG XL. [1], where is has better quality than even AVIF at >0.5 bpp ( Bits per Pixel ) [2].
But the truly amazing next generation VVC manage to compress image with even better ratio than JPEG XL.
Both JPEG XL and VVC is expected to be finalised in July/Augest. JPEG XL will be royalty free. VVC as usual is lots of unknown.
[1]https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs
[2] https://medium.com/@scopeburst/mozjpeg-comparison-44035c42abe8
franciscop · 2018-11-18
Cool project and design, kudos!
For a couple of tips as someone who uses Heroku, mlab (mongolab), etc:
- Something like https://cloudinary.com/ can automatically compress those images. Will speed up the load and make the project shine even more, since it is loading now a 1390px image in a 320px space.
- A redirect from the netlify.com to the main domain would also be a good idea.
spacec0wb0y · 2018-10-11
GatsbyJS + Contentful API + Cloudinary : https://www.contentful.com/r/knowledgebase/gatsbyjs-and-contentful-in-…
https://cloudinary.com/
liveoneggs · 2014-08-22
http://cloudinary.com/ has a similar auto-detect feature but sells it mostly as saving space with webp for chrome
waterlooalex · 2014-06-23
Looks like you built your own http://cloudinary.com but with less features
michaelmior · 2012-08-04
Awesome to see something like this open sourced. Definitely going to check this out. For those who don't have the resources available to manage this kind of infrastructure however, you may wish to look at Cloudinary (http://cloudinary.com/).
Pikamander2 · 2024-08-24
Compared to the stark differences between BMP/JPG/PNG/GIF, there's a ton of overlap between WEBP/HEIC/AVIF/JPEGXL.
Naturally, some types of images tend to compress better with some formats than others, and then you may have to take into account things like the desired quality level, encoding time, etc.
https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg
Realistically, any of those four new formats would be fine for 99% of the images that exist, but it would still be nice for every browser to support them all so that web developers can choose their favorite format.
Although, on the flip side, the drawback of having so many formats floating around is that software developers have to spend more time supporting it all. Even trillion dollar companies like Microsoft are seemingly in no rush to make sure that formats like WebP are as well integrated into their software as JPG/PNG were.
janwas · 2024-05-04
> PSNR is a terrible measure of quality
Glad we can agree on that. Unfortunately many evals use that or plain SSIM, which is still L2 at heart.
> Encoding speed is not really a concern for web uses
hm, in many discussions with Jon of Cloudinary, I did not get the impression that this is the case. Imagine their enthusiasm about 100x-ing their compute costs.
> Can you say why it was not included in your 2020 subjective evaluation?
The paper's comment on this is: "The selection of anchors is based on the general popularity of the codecs and the availability of the software implementations. We only intended to use codecs which are standardized internationally."
> using an ITU recommend methodology
While this has some helpful guidance on viewing conditions, it is unfortunately still subjective (what parts are observers looking at, what counts as "annoying") and is more useful for detecting severe artifacts, which less relevant in practice because that's hopefully not the quality range people are using.
Also, these results are quite old and both encoders have changed since then.
> need to speculate on the relative quality of AVIF v JPEG XL at web bitrates.
No need to speculate :) Just to first agree on what are actual web bitrates. From Chrome metrics, IIRC it was over 1bpp. Here's some newer data: https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/what-compression-ratio-ranges-are-us… Even for AVIF, the median is 0.96 and q3 is 1.79(!).
Jon has written several…
lonjil · 2024-04-03
> Their claims about Jpegli seem to make WebP obsolete regarding lossy encoding? Similar compression estimates as WebP versus JPEG are brought up.
I believe Jpegli beats WebP for medium to high quality compression. I would guess that more than half of all WebP images on the net would definitely be smaller as Jpegli-encoded JPEGs of similar quality. And note that Jpegli is actually worse than MozJPEG and libjpeg-turbo at medium-low qualities. Something like libjpeg-turbo q75 is the crossover point I believe.
> Hell, I question if AVIF is even worth it with Jpegli.
According to another test [1], for large (like 10+ Mpix) photographs compressed with high quality, Jpegli wins over AVIF. But AVIF seems to win for "web size" images. Though, as for point 2 in your next paragraph, Jpegli is indeed much faster than AVIF.
> JPEG XL would've still been worth it though because it's just covering so much more ground than JPEG/Jpegli and it has a streaming decoder like a sensible format geared for Internet use, as well as progressive decoding support for mobile networks.
Indeed. At a minimum, JXL gives you another 20% size reduction just from the better entropy coding.
[1] https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front
alwillis · 2024-02-04
> The argument is: (1) the cost is large -- implementation and maintenance of a complex image codec takes time, and image codecs are high-risk from a security perspective.
If you look at the history of Google employees created the basis for JPEG XL [1], having it included in beta builds of Chrome and then removing it "for reasons", it's pretty obvious it wasn't pulled for technical or security reasons.
Obviously Apple didn't think there were significant security and implementation issues preventing them from enabling JPEG XL on over 2 billion devices.
The Chrome team has proposed a number of web features and APIs that Apple, Mozilla and sometimes Microsoft don't want to implement due to security and privacy reasons. Usually that doesn't stop Chrome from going ahead and shipping them anyway.
> (2) the benefit is relatively small -- it needs to provide a clear advantage over existing alternatives like jpg, png, webp, avif in some significant general use cases.
JPEG XL does provide advantages over existing alternatives—The Case for JPEG XL [2]:
In the past, new image formats have been introduced that brought improvements in some areas while also introducing regressions in others. For example, PNG was a great improvement over GIF, except that it did not support animation. WebP brought compression improvements over JPEG in the low to medium fidelity range but at the cost of losing progressive decoding and high-fidelity 4:4:4 encoding. AVIF…
cjawdb · 2023-06-06
I'm confused where you got "it was available for years and ignored in popular software" from? Most of the ISO standard was only published last year, with the last bit being published in October 2022. IIRC AVIF is almost ~4 years old by the same standards and WebP is over a decade old.
Adobe has partial support (in Camera RAW) with presumably further support coming considering their website recommends JXL alongside AVIF for HDR images. It's also supported by Affinity Photo 2, Krita, Darkroom, GIMP, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, Paint.net, anything Qt/KDE-based via plugin, Pale Moon, libvips, and almost every third-party image viewer that I've ever used or heard of (nomacs, Irfanview, ImageGlass, xnView, etc.). It also has had vocal support from senior engineers at a variety of companies like Facebook, Shopify, Cloudinary, Intel, Flickr, etc.
My first thought when I heard about JXL several months ago was "oh, a new JPEG-2000?" but I've quickly become a JXL evangelist after reading more about it and then playing around with libjxl myself.
https://jpegxl.info/why-jxl.html
https://jpegxl.io/articles/faq/
https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl
rndgermandude · 2022-04-27
Comparing compression ratios is tricky. What you usually want is "file size at same visual quality" or "visual quality as same file size" for comparisons. The problem here is that "visual quality" is in the eye of the beholder, Different base images will have different results.
There are some attempts at such comparisons, e.g. https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs (cloudinary might be biased, as they are a major driver behind jpeg-xl)
My overall impression is that it's roughly on par or a little behind with AVIF, somewhat ahead of HEIC and very ahead of WEBP (and jpeg of course) in quality-per-byte.
As for encode and decode speed, it's a bit slower than WEBP but beats AVIF and HEIC by a margin (unless these codecs are back by hardware encoders). However, all three codecs are relatively new and there may be a lot of future speed optimizations possible. Especially jpeg-xl, which isn't "backed" by general AV1 (AVIF), vpx (WEBP) or HEVC (HEIC) research, may have a particularly large yet to be tapped potential for (hardware-specific) optimizations. As far as I know, jpeg-xl is also "simpler" than those other codecs (which basically used the iframes of their complex sibling video codecs as a base), so it might be more feasible to have more competing implementations.
But time will tell, and it will of course also largely depend on the adoption and thus network effects of these formats who much "love" each format receives from open source and…
JusticeJuice · 2021-08-23
I think you just described https://cloudinary.com/
porker · 2017-07-14
There's always http://cloudinary.com/
noacloudinary · 2016-07-03
Hi guys, we at Cloudinary provide cloud based end-to-end digital asset management solution and our challenges here are super interesting - from technical, scale, performance, security, high availability and product perspectives.
Adding to that challenges around real continuous deployment, automation, development process etc.
We are now managing milliards of images and more than 1000 interactions and transactions in a sec!!
Our R&D team is super small and super strong - we have CTO's/ people with former startups and they all chose Cloudinary thanks to our interesting challenges.
From the personal perspective and work life balance, we are one of a kind.
The company is self funded, profitable with more than tens of thousands of customers and we keep growing!!
We are now looking for an amazing, brilliant, creative developers to join us in our office in Israel (Located in Petach- Tiqwa) - Backend, Front end, SDK's and Devops (engineer and manager).
In addition we have open positions in our Customer Success and sales teams.
To read more about our openings: http://cloudinary.com/jobs
You can send CV's to [email protected]
wmoxam · 2015-10-28
http://cloudinary.com is another good service.