How do you turn one product photo into a thumbnail and a large image?

Upload one original photo to Cloudinary’s Media Library. Choose the crop and size for the small product card and the larger detail page. Cloudinary can deliver those versions from the same original.

A shop owner can add catalog photos manually in the Media Library. For customer uploads, have your developer choose and restrict the upload settings and keep the Cloudinary secret on the server. Start with one use for the image before building an automatic pipeline.

Start with one public sample photo
Pick a picture you own and can share publicly, such as a photo of a mug. Upload it to a test environment and keep your local original.
Make two useful versions
Use the image controls to try a square crop for the product card and a larger version for the detail page. Check that the crop keeps the whole handle visible.
Look at the real page
Open the page on a narrow screen and check the small image still looks good. Ask your developer to confirm that the product card loads the smaller file, instead of downloading the original and shrinking it on screen.

Does a private original also make the thumbnail private?

Cloudinary’s delivery type named Private protects the original, while transformed copies are public by default. For an image whose original and variants both need protection, Cloudinary documents the Authenticated delivery type.

Authenticated variants must be generated in advance before they can be delivered through signed URLs. Have the app check the viewer’s access before handing out a URL. A signature alone does not establish an expiry or a customer identity. If you need links with time or session restrictions, check Cloudinary’s documented options and their plan requirements. Rehearse signed-out access to the original and the preview using a harmless sample.

What uses Cloudinary’s image credits?

Cloudinary’s Free Image and Video API plan lists 25 monthly credits across storage, transformations and delivery. Generating a new size can use transformation credits. Delivering the same size again can still use bandwidth, the amount of image data sent to viewers.

If an ordinary image setup uses 1 GB of storage, 1,000 standard transformations and 2 GB of delivered images, those uses add up to about four credits. On Free, transformations and delivery are measured across the latest 30 days. Storage is measured as the space you currently use. Video, advanced processing and some delivery setups have different rules.

Example image-credit units
What Cloudinary measures	Typical equivalent of one credit
A newly generated version	1,000 standard transformations
Space used by files and their saved versions	1 GB of managed storage
Data sent to viewers	1 GB of image bandwidth in the standard case

Can you keep the originals and remove old copies?

The Media Library can download an original, and Cloudinary documents ways to download selected files in bulk. Save the original file, your app’s file identifier and any crop or sizing rules you need to recreate the page elsewhere.

Backup and version settings determine what you can restore. Check that an original comes back before relying on those settings. Deleting a file from storage does not necessarily remove copies that have already been cached for delivery. Request cache invalidation where needed and verify a fresh request using the actual original and thumbnail addresses. Keep an independent copy of anything you must be able to restore.