Advanced delivery options

Uploadcare offers multiple CDN settings, as well as non-image specific operations which can modify its behavior.

Custom CDN CNAME

Use your own domain for CDN links to your files stored with Uploadcare. By default, all file URLs use ucarecdn.com domain. By setting a Custom CDN CNAME, the file URLs can use cdn.mycompany.com instead.

Depending on your plan, you can connect Uploadcare CDN to your domain or subdomain with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. Custom plans let you choose any CDN you prefer.

Pick a domain name you want to use (e.g., cdn.mycompany.com), contact us and let us know about your choice.

We'll tell you the domain name your CNAME should point to, e.g. mycompany.ucarecdn.com.

Add a CNAME record to your DNS zone, e.g.: cdn.mycompany.com CNAME mycompany.ucarecdn.com

We'll issue an SSL certificate on our end, so you don't need to provide your one. Then we'll set things up on our side. It usually takes 1-2 business days. Once everything is set up, and DNS changes propagate, you will need to use new URLs with your domain name.

Configure your widgets to return proper URLs, e.g.:

UPLOADCARE_CDN_BASE = "https://cdn.mydomain.com";html

Replace hostname in URLs of already uploaded files served by your app. We recommend having an easily configurable setting over the hard-coding hostname of your URLs.

Cache duration

By default, uploaded files are cached for up to one year. Please contact us if you need to delete the cached version when deleting a file.

Search engine indexing

Uploadcare adds response headers that tell search engines not to index the content of files in your project to increase the privacy of your and your user's data. You can toggle this behavior separately for each project in Dashboard in Delivery configure page.

File indexing by search engines is disabled by default.

Non-image specific operations

Note: You can find detailed specification in the URL API reference.

Change filename

Your original filenames can be accessed via REST API. Make a request to receive a JSON response with file parameters including original_filename.

You can set an optional filename that users will see instead of the original name:

https://ucarecdn.com/:uuid/:filename

:filename should comply with file name conventions and it should be a valid part of a URL. For example, filename.ext.

Get file info as JSON

-/json/

Returns file-related information, such as image dimensions or geotagging data in the JSON format.

/:uuid/-/json/
/:uuid/-/preview/-/json/

In the second option, json response will contain the original key with the info on your original image.

Get file info as application/javascript

-/jsonp/

Same as the example above, but it returns data as the application/javascript type. The callback name should always be uploadcare_callback. It should receive the two following arguments: id and a response object. For original files, id is equivalent to their UUIDs. For processed files, id is equivalent to their URLs, excluding the last operation, jsonp.

/:uuid/-/jsonp/
/:uuid/-/preview/-/jsonp/

In the first case id will be c5b7dd84-c0e2-48ff-babc-d23939f2c6b4, in the second: /c5b7dd84-c0e2-48ff-babc-d23939f2c6b4/-/preview/.

Perceptual hash

File info response includes a value of a perceptual hash calculated using pixel contents of an image. Perceptual hashing is a common fingerprinting technique to quickly compare images and find duplicates or similar images.

Uploadcare automatically calculates a 64-bit long perceptual hash value and returns it as a HEX string. In this example, the perceptual hash value is 940f5fd09aa48ddc:

{
  "id": "1b192edb-212d-401a-ad9b-529047272e1b",
  "datetime_original":null,
  "orientation":null,
  "height":1600,
  "width":2400,
  "geo_location":null,
  "format":"JPEG",
  "hash":"940f5fd09aa48ddc"
}

It’s easy to find image duplicates by quickly comparing their perceptual hash values. To find similar images, it's important to compare perceptual hash values bitwise (Hamming distance). A small number of unmatched bits (e.g., up to 8 bits) will correspond to subtle changes in the visual contents, while non-similar images will usually have more than 8 different bits.

Show or download

-/inline/yes/ -/inline/no/

By default, CDN instructs browsers to show images and download other file types. The inline control allows you to change this behavior.

/:uuid/-/preview/-/inline/no/
/:uuid/-/inline/yes/

File groups operations

Groups are file collections. Use them to organize content in your Uploadcare project. A common use case is to use them in the single content upload or delivery transactions.

For instance, you can create groups when you upload multiple files. For the File Uploader this option is turned off by default. When it's turned on, it stores UUIDs of uploaded files. You can access file collections via :group_uuid:

:group_uuid is similar to a single file UUID, but it has the file number ~N at the end. A group can contain up to 1000 files.

A group URL will show a list of individual file URLs with their UUIDs, and index numbers in that group.

Check out our our API refs for creating and managing groups.

Accessing single files in a group

Request a specific file in a group by adding /nth/i/, where i is a file index, starting from 0:

/:group_uuid/nth/0/
/:group_uuid/nth/1/
/:group_uuid/nth/2/

Note, there is no /-/ separator after a group UUID. It's required for transformations only.

By the way, you can apply Image Transformations to indivitual files within a group:

/:group_uuid/nth/0/-/resize/256x/

You can also group the processed files with the respective operation sequences. When you request a file by its group URL, it'll include all operations before adding it to that group. Adding more operations after /-/ will apply them over the existing ones.

Get a group as an archive

Getting a group as an archive is done via the archive group processing operation.

The operation limits are:

  • A total size of uncompressed files ≤ 2 GB.
  • Processing operations will be discarded. Only original files will be archived.

Here's how to get an archived file group:

/:group_uuid/archive/:format/:filename
  • :group_uuid — UUID of a file group you want to get as an archive.
  • :format — the format of that output archive, we support zip and tar.
  • :filename (optional) — output archive filename.

Note: If the group contains a removed file, the archive operation will fail with a 404 error code.

Bring your CDN

If you depend on a specific CDN infrastructure or are under contract, you can use your current CDN with our platform. Schedule demo with us.