HTTP API

Base URL: https://production-transformation-serializer.cloudinary.com

No authentication. Nothing the service returns is customer-scoped, so there is no token to obtain and no header to set beyond content-type.

Requests are rate limited per IP (600 per 15 minutes by default). If you are encoding on every keystroke in a browser, use the ESM bundle instead — it does the same work locally and does not touch the network at all.

---

POST /api/v0/encode#

Model → transformation string.

Request

{
  "model": [
    { "actionType": "scale", "dimensions": { "width": 200 } },
    { "actionType": "blur", "strength": 500 }
  ]
}

Response 200

{ "transformationString": "c_scale,w_200/e_blur:500" }

Every element of model must be an object with a string actionType; other properties are action-specific and are passed through. An empty model encodes to an empty string.

Qualifiers are emitted in alphabetic order within an action — the canonical form of specification §3.7.

---

POST /api/v0/decode#

Transformation string → model.

Request

{ "transformationString": "c_scale,w_200/e_blur:500" }

Response 200

{
  "model": [
    { "actionType": "scale", "dimensions": { "width": 200 } },
    { "actionType": "blur", "strength": 500 }
  ]
}

transformationString is required but may be empty, which decodes to [].

Decoding does not reject unfamiliar syntax: a segment the compiler does not recognise becomes a custom action holding the raw text, so re-encoding reproduces it. See specification §4.3.

---

---

Errors#

Validation failures return 400 with the offending paths:

{
  "errors": [
    { "path": "model.0.actionType", "message": "Invalid input: expected string, received undefined" }
  ]
}

A malformed JSON body returns 400 with { "error": "Invalid JSON payload" }. Exceeding the rate limit returns 429 with RateLimit-* headers describing the window.

CORS#

/api/v0/encode and /api/v0/decode are restricted to *.cloudinary.com origins (plus localhost for local development).

If you need /api/v0/encode from another origin, the ESM bundle removes the question: there is no request to make.