We use Cloudinary to store various media related to the vehicles, such as engine sound recordings and images of the vehicle from different angles, including the interior. Recently, we've also started storing short engine videos, around 15 seconds. Additionally, vehicle documents are stored on the platform, and the front-end team uses it to handle user uploads.

The Cloudinary Dart package is poorly implemented. It works for simple use cases but fails when implementing more advanced features, like handling signatures. It appears to be outsourced, and several important elements are missing. For instance, some necessary class exports are absent, meaning if you need a class to create a request, you must import it manually. It relies on hard-coded strings, making it nearly unusable for anything beyond basic tasks. While it might work without signatures or advanced features, it's unreliable for more complex use cases.

Unlike Firebase Storage, Cloudinary handles media-specific tasks like re-encoding uploads. For example, when users upload a video from an Apple device, it's often encoded in a proprietary Apple codec. Cloudinary automatically reduces the file size and re-encodes it into a more open format suitable for the web or other devices. We had issues with our engine sound recordings when using Firebase, as it would simply accept the file and make it available without validating the audio. After switching to Cloudinary, it validates the files, and if any are corrupted, the upload fails with an appropriate error message. This validation helped us identify corrupted audio files we couldn't play before.

The main issue with the package is how it handles errors. It swallows errors and throws its own, but without preserving the stack trace, making debugging nearly impossible. It ends with a vague argument error, without any clue where or why it happened. 

I have been using Cloudinary for one year.

Cloudinary does experience occasional downtimes or unavailability, slightly more often than Firebase. But you can't really compare the two, as Firebase is backed by Google and has servers all over the world. This is understandable, given that Cloudinary is a smaller company, and their pricing reflects that difference.

50 users are using this solution.

We’ve always been able to find answers either directly in the documentation or, in the worst case, by searching online. Cloudinary has a support forum where more complex or uncommon issues are discussed. If you Google the error message or code, you can easily find the right fix.

We switched from Firebase to Cloudinary mainly because Cloudinary was already used in other departments. As part of addressing technical debt, we questioned why we were still using Firebase when Cloudinary was available. Previously, media from vehicle inspectors was uploaded to Firebase; then, the backend would re-upload it to Cloudinary, duplicating the work. To streamline this process and cut costs, we eliminated Firebase and uploaded media directly to Cloudinary. 

The initial setup was easy because we rewrote much of it ourselves. I submitted a pull request to fix some signature-related issues, but we uncovered more problems with the code afterward. As a result, we created a class tailored to our needs, and it's been working well since then. The main problem lies with the Dart package itself. The product documentation, features, and API are pretty clear so we can implement them without issues. The documentation is acceptable; the Dart package caused the trouble.

It is reasonably priced.

If you're working with documents like JSON or TXT files, I'm not entirely sure Cloudinary would be the best fit for that. But it's an excellent option for dealing with media files, mainly due to its media validation. Cloudinary will check for corrupted video or audio files and can re-encode them into different formats without much effort—you modify the URL, and it handles everything server-side.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten.

The first time I discovered Cloudinary, I mainly used it to store my images. If you are on our website, where people must upload images, then instead of storing the images in a database, I stored them in Cloudinary, which gave me a link to the image. The link is what you store in the database, and it becomes easier. Cloudinary added a new AI feature, and it is amazing. When I tried it out, it was powerful, and I used it in a project and loved it.

The most valuable features of the solution revolve around image storage. I think that is what is cool about the tool, and I use it the most. The AI is promising. There are so many things you can do with the tool. You can edit images, and you can refine images to make them clearer. The tool supports searches, meaning you can search the elements inside the image. If there is an image of a landscape, you can use certain options to search for that image. You can search for all the images that have particular areas from your image. It could get you all the images with the particular aspect of the image you provide or choose, which I think makes working easier.

I don't know what needs improvement in the product since there are so many features that I would not like Cloudinary to change. It offers a very good setup phase. The AI does not offer image generation. If Cloudinary can add a way or a model that can generate the image, then you won't need to upload images to it. You can just provide a prompt through AI, then generate the image and manipulate it the way you want. I think the changes in the AI can make things a little bit faster.

I have been using Cloudinary for two years. I am a customer of Cloudinary.

Considering that there are many users with many images, they want to change the platform and the design. If you are not going to put all the images in Cloudinary, then it will be easy if you have to update all the images. It can cause a little bit of uptime. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have not faced issues with bugs or any breakdowns in the tool.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a six to seven out of ten.

There are around a few thousand in the company who use it.

I have not had any issues that caused me to contact the product's support, but I can say that Cloundinary's LinkedIn page is very active.

Previously, I used to store the images in the database.

According to me, the product's initial setup phase was easy. I don't know what kind of person will be using it, but if it is a little bit technical, then it is very easy. One just needs to do some setup phases in Cloudinary Generative AI Playground, making it a very, very intuitive tool. I think there is very good documentation about the tool's setup phase. If you are a technical person, it should be easy. If you are new, you can just go through the documentation. It is a very intuitive tool.

The deployment process would take less than two minutes to be completed.

It has a free plan.

Cloudinary's automation features save time and resources. The image search feature is very intuitive and can save you a lot of time if you want to get an idea of the image you want to look for but don't know anything about that exact image. You can just use the items in the image to look for an image. Another one is if you are working on a project and the images you have there are not that clear, then you can easily, with a few clicks, make them clear. I think that that saves you the effort of going to an image editor to refine it. With the images in the background, you can just remove that part from the image on the fly. You also get the refill features. If your image is smaller and you want a bigger one, you can use the AI tool to add more elements to the pictures.

So far, I have not seen anything challenging in the product. There is not too much technical stuff you need to know to use it.

The AI features that I have used the most in the product and found to be beneficial include areas like the image refill functionality, image background removal, and the image definer so that if your image is not that clear, it can clear the image. You can change the color and elements in the image. If there is a book with an image that is white, and you want a book with blue pages, you can just tell the AI to make the pages blue. You can remove a few objects from the image.

Considering how easy it is to use the product and since I have used it in some of my projects, I can recommend it to others.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I use it to upload images. I primarily use it to store and load images. 

So far, so good. It implements most of what we need in development, including the option to upload images from other cloud storage platforms. I haven't seen any problems with it.

It's quite effective for what we use it for. It is a decent tool. 

I like its ease of implementation. I can easily call the API into my platform and use it to upload images from the machine to the server. 

The good thing is that it doesn't store the actual image on your server. It stores the image on its server, and the users get a URL or link that they can use to call the images from the Cloudinary server. The images are optimized to load on the user's platform. 

For non-technical users, the initial setup could be made easier. 

I've been using Cloudinary for six months now. The one I'm using is on the cloud.

So far, we haven't experienced any challenges with bulk uploads or a large number of users. With the current number of users, it's working well for us.

The platform we use is to upload images. The end users upload their respective images to our platform, and that's when they use Cloudinary. So far, we have over 50 end users.

There are likely administrators who implement Cloudinary within the company. But that is for the people who use the platform. 

So, the number of end users is subject to change because the more users who join the platform, the more they will use Cloudinary. If they use the platform, they have to use Cloudinary because they need the images, and then they upload them to Cloudinary.

The documentation is great. It's comprehensive.

Before Cloudinary, we were using an in-house development platform. It was Multer. It's a Node.js library that we can implement to store images on our local server.

Main reason behind the switch to Cloudinary:

The main reason is image optimization. Images can be stored and processed on the web in different ways, affecting website performance. When you upload an image to Cloudinary, it is optimized—the size is reduced without impacting the quality. This smaller size helps the website load faster. Images are a major cause of slow website loading times if they aren't optimized, so I think that's the reason we chose Cloudinary.

The setup was easy. We're using the Cloudinary API on our platform, and I think it was easy for any technical person. We didn't encounter many challenges.

Perhaps a "plug and play" option could be implemented for non-technical teams, but for those with technical backgrounds, it's already quite straightforward.

For us, the price is okay. The major challenges with cloud platforms usually occur when a team scales rapidly or experiences a sudden increase in users. If, for example, we suddenly went from fifty users to a million, the bill could be a shock. But so far, we haven't had any problems.

I would absolutely recommend Cloudinary. 

Here's why:

1. It's easy to set up, which saves development time.
2. You'll get a much nicer user experience because images load faster on your platform.
3. It's easy for a first-time user.

I would give it a nine. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is because I'm not sure about its scalability yet. We haven't tested that aspect. But so far, so good.

We used Cloudinary as a library within our project's tech stack, primarily for image transformation.

It was an online platform for selling artwork. There was a requirement that when an artist uploads an image to the website, it should instantly create mockups of how the artwork would look in various interior spaces. Because of this requirement, we switched from S3 on AWS to Cloudinary.

The automation tools were used most often. They are quite convenient and cover our requirements.

It actually supports the growth of the business because it gives us a lot of out of the box things. We can easily do things in a week that we weren't able to do before.

First, it has a broad API for image transformation, which was easy to understand with their tutorials. It took about a week to get everything working. 

Second, they have a great UI that makes it easy to search and organize images. I think the combination of these two things makes Cloudinary very valuable.

Cloudinary is great for image and video transformation, especially when clients download assets to your website, and you need to manipulate them. They also have a free tier, which is great for trying out the platform before committing and understanding the platform. 

However, there was one issue I remember: the inability to easily work with folders when using the API. For example, we couldn't delete all images from a folder at once due to limitations, likely because they use AWS and S3. It wasn't a major issue, but it would have been more convenient to have that functionality.

I've been using Cloudinary extensively for about half a year on a certain project.

I don't recall any bugs or unavailability issues. It was a quite stable product.

There were three of us using it: I was the admin, and two others were users.

I contacted the customer service and support at the beginning, I had a question about a transformation that wasn't working as expected. I asked the question in their Discord group, and they quickly provided assistance.

Cloudinary support was quite responsive. 

Positive

We used it as a dependency in our Java project. Adding the dependencies and working with the API was not difficult. Cloudinary provided a detailed tutorial explaining the protocols for transformations and other features. 

Cloudinary also has excellent documentation. If you need help with something, you'll definitely find the information you need. I don't recall any major problems during the process. It obviously takes some time to explore and learn, but it's not overly complex.

From what I've used, it's actually cheap compared to other options like AWS.

There was some research done. From my side, Cloudinary caught my eye because of their helpful tutorials sent via email, especially the Java-specific quickstart guide since we were using Java. It was a quick start for us – we knew upfront what we needed to do and could see results immediately.

Additionally, I remember a video on Cloudinary's website or YouTube that showcased image transformations. It showed how images could look like pencil drawings or paintings, which aligned with our requirements. We realized that Cloudinary could meet our needs, and it wasn't so hard to opt for it. 

It's easy for a beginner to learn to use Cloudinary. 

My advice/recommendation depends on your business projects and requirements. But if you work with digital assets like images, Cloudinary is a good option. I haven't explored video features extensively, but for image manipulation, it's definitely suitable. If your project is small to medium-sized, it's perhaps the best choice.

I even recommended Cloudinary to a friend in the industry who was looking for ways to work with images.

If I didn't have a lot of time to explore, I would definitely choose Cloudinary. But if I had more time and ownership of the decision, I might explore the market again. Not because I'm dissatisfied with Cloudinary, but to understand the broader view of what's available, since I haven't been in this area for some time.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. Cloudinary has a good user interface (UI), but there are some things the product can improve, like convenience.  For example, compared to another tool I've used, Stripe, Cloudinary's UI feels a little lacking. There's room for improvement.

I used the solution just to learn about the platform, and I used it for a couple of personal websites. Mainly, the websites have a lot of images or galleries. What I liked was that previously, when I was making websites, I had to create a lot of images manually to a certain size to be responsive for screens of different sizes. Then I learned about Cloudinary and how it does it all for you. You can upload your assets to Cloudinary, and it automatically detects the user's browser and sets up the image in the right format to optimize the right size, which is amazing.

When you're starting off, it can be a little bit overwhelming. I am just gonna look at the screen now. Once you log in, you have a management console and many different things, so you won't really know where to go. The onboarding could be made a bit easier. I did Cloudinary's courses. If you use the tool's UI, there are different icons on the left screen, and you won't know where to go first and what is important. The UX can be improved a bit.

When you open the product's management console, it can just be a little bit overwhelming at first until you figure it out. Cloudinary just needs to relook at how to simplify the tool or use the tool's guidance walkthroughs for new users.

The product needs to get noticed, it is important to have someone from Cloudinary on Stack Overflow or Syntax.fm and talk with the developer community.

I have been using Cloudinary for six months. I am a customer of the tool.

I have not seen any bugs or breakdowns. The tool's performance when the site loads up is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I am using the tool for myself. In my organization, where I work, they don't use Cloudinary. In our company, we do have a kind of CDN, but it is not the same sort of use as Cloudinary. All our assets are of a fixed size and dimension.

The ease or difficulty of the product's initial setup phase depends on what you are doing. I think it is fairly easy because there are a lot of samples to show you how things work in the tool. For instance, in my case, I use Netlify to deploy sites, and then there is a plug-in there that integrates with your project, so those kinds of plug-ins are great. I think it is easy enough since there are enough samples to get you going.

I use the free plan, and that is enough for one or two websites. Though I felt that the product price is reasonable, I don't have any price details of any tools to help me make comparisons.

The tool's automation features save time and resources. Previously, images used to have watermarks, especially the ones in Photoshop, and that was very tedious, but Cloudinary is a huge time saver. Cloudinary automatically optimizes the images for the browser, so instead of making a choice yourself for images like JPEG, PNG, AVIF, or WEBP, the client or end user's browser might support them, but Cloudinary takes that decision for you, and it just serves the right image or the best-optimized image, which is sort of safe. You don't have to go through the steps manually to optimize the size of an image.

When integrating with other tools, the hectic part is just really the time or laboriousness of the process. First of all, you've got to have some sort of image editing tool, and then you have got to be comfortable using it, but luckily, I have a background. I have used Photoshop for many years, but I think it is not so easy for many developers since you may be used to working with codes but not necessarily optimizing images unless you are a designer. I think it solves the aforementioned problem very nicely because you are just focusing on using the API.

It is a really good product. It has some features that I struggled to find elsewhere since you automatically crop your image. It can use AI to determine that there is a person in the image, and we can make that person the focus of the image.

I have only played around with the tool's AI part.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I use the solution for posting images.

The solution should be made more user-friendly because sometimes it's hard to understand.

I have been using Cloudinary for two months.

I have faced many bugs while using the solution.

Around five people are using the solution in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution’s pricing is moderate.

The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I didn't have to use my card to use Cloudinary. I recommend Cloudinary to other users because Amazon is a bit expensive for me. It is easy for somebody new to learn to use Cloudinary for the first time.

Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.