Resizing images and transformations with Cloudinary

Having integrated with Cloudinary to take advantage of our basic image uploading and serving needs, we may turn our attention to leveraging some of its more powerful features to make building our web application easier. One of Cloudinary's best strengths is its image processing transformation options, which provide a sophistication rarely found in most cloud storage systems that make tailoring assets for specific web application purposes very easy. Let's explore how we can leverage these transformation options to automatically optimize our images after upload to Cloudinary.

Getting ready

Let's create a middleware layer to our Express web server to customize our requested image styling. We will load images from our localhost:3000/api/images/:id route, but will pass through some customization options as URL parameters to change the width, height, crop, and even format of the image result returned to us.

For this recipe, we will need to install...