What is the difference between uploading from a remote URL and using fetch?

Cloudinary allows you to upload images from any public HTTP/HTTPS URL, which allows for much faster uploading of the images compared to downloading the files to your server or computer and uploading the file to Cloudinary as a separate step.

You can upload images from remote URLs either using our standard upload API, where the URL should be passed as the 'file' parameter, by using our fetch remote image URL image type, or by using our Auto upload remote resources feature which copies images to your account the first time the images are requested from us.

Uploading the images explicitly has some advantages over using fetching or auto-upload:

• More APIs to manage your images - programmatically browse, list, tag, delete, query (access image EXIF data and semantic data) your assets
• Cloudinary Media Library can manage the uploaded assets - manage your images online, with user access management -view, transform, tag, search, delete images.
• Eager transformations - create multiple variations of the same image during upload rather than on-the-fly. Important for lengthy transformations (e.g. manipulating animated gifs and videos).
• SEO-friendly short URLs - upload URLs do not contain the lengthy URL of the original image which is present when you use the fetched image feature
• Use of Cloudinary's access control features - Uploaded images can be marked as private or authenticated which limits how they can be used and accessed: https://cloudinary.com/documentation/control_access_to_media
• Have Cloudinary manage your images availability - With uploaded images, Cloudinary stores your images including backups, historical revisions, etc. 'Fetch'ed urls are stored on Cloudinary for cache purposes only and are considered temporary, which means that you'll need the remote URL to still contain an accessible copy of the image in the long term.