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GuidesIntegrationsAPI ReferencesRelease notes
  • Introduction
    • Overview
    • Quick Start
    • Projects
    • Billing
  • Uploading
    • Overview
    • Uploading files with API
    • File analysis on upload
  • Optimization
    • Overview
  • Transformations
      • Overview
      • Resize, crop, rotation
      • Overlays and watermarks
      • Effects and enhancements
      • Face-detection based transformations
      • SVG transformations
      • Background removal
      • Baked transformations
      • Object recognition
  • Delivery
    • Overview
    • On-the-fly operations
    • CDN settings
    • Proxy
  • Security
    • Overview
    • Validation and moderation
    • Signed uploads
    • Signed URLs
    • Unsafe content moderation
    • Malware protection
    • HIPAA workflows
  • Storage
    • Uploadcare storage
    • Cloudflare R2
    • Google Cloud Storage
    • Azure Blob Storage
  • File management
    • Overview
    • Managing files
    • File groups
    • Webhooks
    • Arbitrary file metadata
  • CLI
    • Overview
    • Configuration
  • Migration
    • Migration to Uploadcare
    • Migration from Filestack
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On this page
  • How it works
  • Full list of image transformations operations
  • Limitations
TransformationsImage

Image transformations

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Resize, crop, rotation

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Built with

With Uploadcare, you can easily build custom image processing workflows and automate most image transformation tasks. For example, you can set up a chain of actions for user-generated images that’ll unify their look.

Use and stack transformations right in the image URL:

Original image

Original image

Sharpened image

Sharpen -/sharp/15/

Enhanced image

Enhance -/enhance/100/

How it works

Every URL transformation generates a modified image version on the fly, while the original file stays intact. The transformed image version will be cached on CDN nodes to optimize delivery.

https://:subdomain.ucarecd.net/:uuid/-/resize/200x/

Also, you can fetch and deliver images to apply operations without explicitly uploading them:

https://yoursite.ucr.io/-/preview/-/resize/500x/https://yoursite.com/assets/image.jpg

Image processing operation may only apply to appropriate file. On uploading, the file is analyzed by Uploadcare: file type, metadata, and so on; the file is assigned an attribute is_image. If this attribute is true, then an operation can be applied to the file. See the Limitations section.

When applying any image operation, a new file is created (cached on our CDN, and not counted towards your storage limits). If not set, this file is encoded with the default quality and original format. However, you can adjust them to meet your requirements better.

Full list of image transformations operations

Most of the image processing operations work on-the-fly:

  • Resize, crop, rotation
    • Preview
    • Resize
    • Smart resize
    • Crop
    • Crop by ratio
    • Crop by objects
    • Scale crop
    • Smart crop
    • Crop solid background
    • Border radius and circle crop
    • Set fill color
    • Zoom objects
    • Automatic rotation, EXIF-based
    • Manual rotation
    • Flip
    • Mirror
  • Overlays and watermarks
    • Image overlay
    • Self overlay
    • Text overlay
  • Effects and enhancements
    • Basic color adjustment
    • Enhance
    • Grayscale
    • Inverting
    • Color profile management
      • Conversion to sRGB
      • ICC profile size threshold
    • Photo filters
    • Blur
    • Blur region
    • Blur faces
    • Unsharp masking
    • Sharpen
    • Color recognition
  • Face-detection based transformations
  • Animated images optimization
  • SVG transformations and rasterization

Note: Some image operations can’t be performed on the fly and work asynchronously via REST API:

  • Background removal
  • Object recognition
  • Video thumbnail generation
  • Document thumbnail generation

Image optimization operations can be found in a separate section:

  • Compression
    • Format
    • Quality
    • Adaptive quality
    • Progressive JPEG
    • Meta information control

Limitations

Image processing operations have limits that you should consider:

  • Input image formats
  • Mandatory usage of core operations
  • File size
  • Output image dimensions
  • SVG files
  • Image resolution
  • Rotation
  • Animated images

Learn more about image processing limitations.