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Image Delivery APIs and What You Can Do with Them

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When it comes to websites or apps, images are one of the most powerful ways of representing ideas and attracting visitors. Unfortunately, images often comprise the major portion of the data downloaded when loading a webpage or app. Hence, it is critical to optimize your images and their delivery to suit the respective channel (e.g. mobile, web, IoT) and destination device (browser, smartwatch, mobile app) to offer the best performance and user experience.

We’re excited to introduce you to the "Image Delivery API": your magic tool to modify images on the fly.

Today we’re introducing a new set of APIs that let you manipulate and optimize images while delivering them as content to your site or app.

By adding parameters to the delivered Image URL, you can enhance the quality of the image, create thumbnails, trim, resize, crop, change format, and do a lot more. When you do this, the transformations happens on the fly, and the manipulated images are cached in the CDN for future use.

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By using the images API, you can deliver several different versions of the same image to your website or app without replacing the original image saved in your CMS database.

So what can you modify with the Image Delivery API?

Quite a bit. Here’s the full list:

  • Resize (set height and width)
  • Crop
  • Trim
  • Reorient
  • Convert format
  • Control quality
  • Automate optimization
  • Overlay image
  • Add padding and canvas
  • Apply background color
  • Change device pixel ratio

You can also combine parameters to perform multiple actions at once.

Give It a Try

To best understand how to use the new image delivery API, we recommend you visit our documentation site, where you can learn about and try each parameter. Once you get the hang of it, you can use these functions in your app by adding the parameters to your image URLs.

Go to Image Delivery API documentation

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About Contentstack

The Contentstack team comprises highly skilled professionals specializing in product marketing, customer acquisition and retention, and digital marketing strategy. With extensive experience holding senior positions at renowned technology companies across Fortune 500, mid-size, and start-up sectors, our team offers impactful solutions based on diverse backgrounds and extensive industry knowledge.

Contentstack is on a mission to deliver the world’s best digital experiences through a fusion of cutting-edge content management, customer data, personalization, and AI technology. Iconic brands, such as AirFrance KLM, ASICS, Burberry, Mattel, Mitsubishi, and Walmart, depend on the platform to rise above the noise in today's crowded digital markets and gain their competitive edge.

In January 2025, Contentstack proudly secured its first-ever position as a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). Further solidifying its prominent standing, Contentstack was recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. March 2025 report, “The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems (CMS), Q1 2025.” Contentstack was the only pure headless provider named as a Leader in the report, which evaluated 13 top CMS providers on 19 criteria for current offering and strategy.

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Published: Oct 14, 2017


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