Easy Asset Access with the Cloudinary Media Library Browser Extension

By David Walsh on January 31, 2022

Readers of my blog will know that I've been banging the Cloudinary drum for years. Their awesome media capabilities allow users to optimally deliver images, video, and audio in any format and to any device. Performance, customization, flexibility, optimized delivery... Cloudinary makes media better for everyone.

Another aspect of Cloudinary that I like? Their commitment to developing tools to make using their service as convenient as possible. The latest tool is the Media Library browser extension, a simple extension that gives its users access to their media in from within any tab -- no need to go to the Cloudinary website itself!

If you haven't tried Cloudinary, here's the basic premise: you upload your assets to Cloudinary (via manual drag and drop or using their numerous APIs), then reference the URL provides you for the asset wherever you'd like to use it. You can even modify the URL with predefined parameters to deliver the image in a certain format, certain size, etc.

After installing the extension and providing your credentials, you can right-click any input or WYSIWYG editor to get the Media Library context menu item to insert an image or image URL:

After selecting one of the "Insert" items, you'll see the Media Library modal display, allowing you to select the media of your choice, right from within the current page!

No need open Cloudinary in a new tab to find the images you want to work with, making interacting with Cloudinary much easier! While selecting your image, you can also apply transforms and size adjustments. You can also use fully functioning search and upload images on the spot.

When I saw that Cloudinary created their own extension, I was super excited. Sure they have a WordPress plugin to make using assets in my blog easy, but being able to reference my assets from anywhere is such a convenience!

If you haven't tried Cloudinary yet, you're really missing out. Want to learn more about the great features and usages of Cloudinary? Check out my dozens of previous Cloudinary tutorials!

Recent Features

By David WalshJanuary 20, 2014

5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...

By David WalshJuly 28, 2011

Animating CSS3 Transforms with MooTools Fx

I recently posted an awesome (if I may say so myself) CSS3 / MooTools tutorials called Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools. The post presented two ways, a pure CSS method or MooTools-powered class, to duplicate Google+'s elegant photo stack...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshMarch 5, 2008

DWRequest: MooTools 1.2 AJAX Listener & Message Display

Though MooTools 1.2 is in its second beta stage, its basic syntax and theory changes have been hashed out. The JavaScript library continues to improve and become more flexible. Fellow DZone Zone Leader Boyan Kostadinov wrote a very useful article detailing how you can add a...

By David WalshSeptember 4, 2009

Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...