How to transform and optimize assets before and on upload

By default, assets uploaded to Cloudinary are saved in their original form. You can generate various derived versions of these assets by applying transformations either during or after the upload process.

Typically, you'll want to keep your original assets unchanged. However, in certain situations, you might prefer to modify the assets before they are stored by applying a transformation as part of the upload request. Unlike eager transformations, which are applied after the asset is stored, incoming transformations are applied before the asset is saved to Cloudinary.

You can apply all manner of transformations including but not limited to formats and sizes that will be better optimized and therefore take up less space in your storage. 

This can be handled with such optimizing transformations as:

- c_limit: Same as the fit mode but only if the original asset is larger than the specified limit (width and height), in which case the asset is scaled down so that it takes up as much space as possible within a bounding box defined by the specified width and height parameters. 

- f_format: Converts (if necessary) and delivers an asset in the specified format regardless of the file extension used originally. In this case you could use a modern file format such as WebM or WebP that can offer a significant increase in compression.

- q_quality: Controls the quality of the delivered asset. Reducing the quality is a trade-off between visual quality and file size. With 100 often times increasing the size and 1 being the absolute lowest quality.

You can read more about how to optimize assets in more depth via our documentation.