What is ImageDelivery.net

Updated on Sep 19, 2024

Quick Summary
  • ImageDelivery.net is the URL of an image optimisation service from CloudFlare

ImageDelivery.net is a service from CloudFlare that optimises and delivers images. If you noticed requests to imagedelivery.net in devtools, that means the site is loading an image from Cloudflare Images such as this page you are currently viewing.


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Contents

How it works

Cloudflare Images are accessible in the Cloudflare backend. From there you can upload a raw image which is given a unique Image ID.


Adding this to your Image Delivery URL will render the image in your browser such as:

https://imagedelivery.net/k0P4EcPiouU_XzyGSmgmUw/38772570-772c-4afd-01b1-6dd4092c7500/public

This allows the URLs to be used in tags on your site to serve images in a fast and performant manner. 

Images are automatically compressed so they load quickly and after the first request, the image is cached on Cloudflare’s CDN to ensure responses are lightning quick.

Transformations are possible by adding parameters directly on the URL itself, which allows them to be performed on the fly depending on how your site needs to render them. The following transformations are possible:

  • Resize and generate JPEG and PNG images and WebP.
  • Save animations as GIF or WebP.
  • Convert the first frame of GIF/WebP animations to a still image.

Key Features of ImageDelivery.net

  1. Image Optimization: Images are automatically optimized in terms of format, size, and quality based on the device and network conditions of the end-user. This helps in reducing page load times and improves the overall user experience.
  2. CDN Integration: By leveraging Cloudflare's global CDN, images are served from the nearest data center to the user, further improving delivery speed.
  3. Caching: Images are cached at the edge, meaning they are stored closer to the end-user, which reduces the time it takes to load the images on subsequent visits.
  4. Dynamic Resizing and Transformation: Cloudflare's Image Resizing feature allows you to resize, crop, and apply transformations to images dynamically, making it easier to serve images tailored to different devices and screen sizes.

Conclusion

We use Cloudflare images on this site and highly recommend it for fast and efficient image management, which dramatically accelerates our blog writing time so we can focus on building our core Page Speed Monitoring product. It takes no more than 10 seconds to upload an image, copy the unique ID and then paste this into the tag in your content. You’ll then see requests to imagedelivery.net in your source code and network requests.

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