## What is image optimization?

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> **Preview**
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> This product or feature is
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> of the [Service Specific
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Image optimization is the process of modifying and delivering high-quality
images in the optimal format, dimensions, and resolution for the device accessing
them. Resizing, compressing, and selecting the right file formats, it
dramatically reduces image file sizes without compromising visual quality.
Unoptimized images are unnecessarily large, forcing users to download extra
data. Optimizing images helps your pages load faster, which improves the
user experience and keeps visitors on your website longer.

Cloud CDN image optimization lets you dynamically transform your
images. Image optimization offloads compute-intensive image
transformations from your origin servers, which reduces compute and data
egress costs while improving page load times and SEO rankings.

This page describes how to configure Cloud CDN image optimization to
process and deliver images directly from the network edge.

Image optimization lets you use explicit URL query parameters for
granular, real-time control over image attributes, such as resizing, cropping,
and format conversion.

Image optimization is an output caching solution. The service processes an image
on its first request for a specific transformation and caches the resulting
variant at the edge. Subsequent requests for the same parameters are served
directly from the CDN cache.

## Key benefits

- **Enhanced web performance**: delivers resized,
  high-quality images directly from Google's global edge network, reducing Page Load
  Time and Time to Interactive (TTI).

- **Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)**: on-the-fly transformations
  significantly reduce egress bandwidth costs by serving lighter, highly
  compressed images.

- **Secure image transformations** : prevents unauthorized image tampering,
  DDoS exploits, or compute-draining requests through seamless integration with
  [Service Extensions](https://docs.cloud.google.com/service-extensions/docs/overview)
  and Cloud CDN [Signed URLs](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/using-signed-urls).

Use the following guides to get started with Cloud CDN image optimization:

- [Getting started](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/configure-image-optimization): to configure image optimization, understand supported input and output image formats and request syntax.
- [Supported operations](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/image-opt-supportedops): to understand all the supported formats, their attributes and examples.
- [Limitations](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/image-opt-limitations): to know about the image optimization limitations and threshold values.
- [Image optimization use cases](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/image-opt-use-cases): to understand the behavior of image transformations, order of transformation, caching and more.
- [Securing image transformation requests](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/image-opt-security): to know about security considerations for Cloud CDN image optimization.
- [Troubleshoot and Best Practices](https://docs.cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/image-opt-monitor-troubleshoot): to know about how to monitor the logs and troubleshoot common issues.