Uploading an image and rewriting an account's transformation presets are not the same kind of action, and Cloudinary keeps them on different servers so a client can hold one and not the other. Connect asset management for day-to-day work; add environment config only when someone is deliberately changing configuration. The API-key exception on Analysis is the detail that will bite a headless setup — plan for OAuth there.
Cloudinary publishes four separate remote servers rather than one. Asset management is the main endpoint; configuration, metadata and analysis each have their own address, and analysis runs over SSE.
- Asset Management — upload, manage, search and transform images and video
- Environment Config — upload presets, mappings, named transformations, webhooks, streaming profiles
- Structured Metadata — metadata fields and rules
- Analysis — AI tagging, moderation and object recognition, on a separate SSE endpoint
OAuth by default, or API key headers. One exception matters: the Analysis server does not accept API keys, so that one is OAuth only.
Paste a URL, then authorize — add the endpoint to your client, then approve the OAuth consent screen