What’s The Best Image Uploader For Your App?

Technology has enabled individual users and businesses all over the world to generate hundreds of digital images. For large enterprises, the image repository comprises thousands of digital pictures. Moreover, image databases consist of a variety of images, ranging from a collection of product images, logos, infographics, and data presentations to natural scenes, cityscapes, individuals, and more. Keeping the importance of massive volumes of data in the form of digital pictures in view, an image uploader is now a necessary tool for everyone. This includes software engineers, company managers, designers, and even individual hobbyists who need the capabilities of storing and manipulating images.

An image upload service is essential if you want to upload images efficiently and reliably. If you are a developer, you want the service to enable you to integrate the image uploading feature in the software you are building. Whether you are a front-end web developer or a back-end programmer, you need APIs for fast image uploads. A platform that supports a wide range of capabilities for a diverse set of platforms, for example, React, Javascript, Java, or Angular file uploads is highly desirable.

In this guide, we have listed a set of business use cases relevant to image upload services. We also have our recommendations for an image uploader that can fulfill the respective task.

Do I Need An Image Uploader?

There are numerous scenarios where you would need an image uploader service, app, or API. Here are a few possible business use cases:

• You have a lot of images on your local machine and need to upload them to a server that optimizes storage.
• You want to upload images to a website or optimized storage, and want to process all of them in bulk. Processing can mean operations such as image resizing, applying different image tones, image rotation, and more.
• You own a website that uses a large number of images and requires corresponding storage. When users visit your website, the image storage should enable faster image access.
• You want your users to be able to quickly upload images to your app or website.
• A secure means of uploading images is required.

What are the Different Image Upload Services?

There are various image upload services available in the market that offer a different set of services. For example, here are a few services:

• filestack
• Cloudinary
• Uploadcare
• Sirv
• imagekit.io

What is the Best Image Uploader for My Task?

There are different tasks you may want to perform using an image upload service. However, very few services cater to all your needs. Here is a list of different tasks that you may want to perform, and the best option for completing them.

Which Service Has the Easiest Image Upload APIs?

Many image upload services allow you to upload images using APIs. For example, filestack, Uploadcare, Sirv, and more all offer APIs.

While there are many APIs that let you upload images, we find that filestack APIs are the easiest, the most reliable, and the most efficient to use. All you need is your API key, and you are good to go. Here is a sample POST request to upload a file from the URL:

curl -X POST \
    -d url="https://assets.filestackapi.com/watermark.png" \
    "https://www.filestackapi.com/api/store/S3?key=MY_API_KEY"

Are There Services for Uploading Images via GUI?

Yes, many services allow image uploading using GUIs. For example, Cloudinary, Sirv, and Uploadcare all let you upload images using GUIs. In this case, we find Cloudinary offers a good solution. It includes an interactive user interface that allows users to upload images from a source to their website or app.

Are There Widgets for Uploading Images?

Yes, many image upload services also provide uploader website widgets. You can consider using filestack’s Javascript file picker, which lets you integrate a file picker for the web, iOS, or Android. Alternatively, Uploadcare and Cloudinary also include widgets for uploading images.

Can I Use APIs to Resize Images Using an Image Uploader Service?

Indeed yes! There are image uploader APIs that let you resize images. As an example, let’s look at filestack API. All you need to add is the resize keyword along with its corresponding parameters:

https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/key-here/resize=height:200/file-id-here

Can I Apply Multiple Transformations to an Image Using Image Uploader APIs?

There are image uploader APIs that not only let you upload images, but also transform them. For this task, we find that filestack APIs are the easiest to use and give the best results. Let’s say you want to resize an image, apply sepia tones to it, and convert it to Polaroid. In this case, you can chain together all the three tasks in one single API:

https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:300/
    sepia=tone:80/polaroid/pdn7PhZdT02GoYZCVYeF

Which Image Upload Service Allows In-Browser Image Editing?

For in-browser image editing, we find that Uploadcare offers a good solution. For example, you can crop images, apply filters, edit images, and more directly in the browser using Uploadcare. Hence, a user can perform in-browser editing easily and quickly.

Do Image Upload Services Allow Video Uploading and Processing?

Indeed yes! Many image upload services also enable you to upload videos. Moreover, they also allow you to process these videos. Services such as those provided by filestack, Cloundinary, and Uploadcare all allow video uploading and processing. However, some services like Sirv only let users upload videos, but do not process them.

Which Service Has Libraries and SDKs for a Diverse Set of Programming Languages and Platforms?

While many services provide libraries and SDKs for integrating file uploads in your software, filestack has the best solution. You can use the SDK or filestack image upload APIs from a wide range of programming languages. For example, you can integrate filestack using Javascript, Java, React, Angular, Swift, PHP, Ruby, and more in your software app.

Which Image Uploader is Best and How Do I Sign Up?

Different image uploaders offer different services, like uploading images through APIs, GUIs, or widgets. Similarly, image editing and transformation is now also offered by many of these services. When we look at their different features, we also have to consider ease of use and efficiency. Filestack offers a wide range of image uploading and image manipulation features. Moreover, its APIs are easy to use, and the SDKs offer various image uploading capabilities for the software app you are developing. We find filestack to be the best image uploading service in the market today.

Do you want to provide your users with an easy digital images uploading experience? Get started by signing up for a free filestack account now!