Key concepts

Here is a summary of the key terms that we use throughout our guides.

Term	What this means
Remote image	An image that is stored outside of Images storage, including images in R2.
Transformation	A request to optimize a remote image that is stored outside of Images.
Origin	The location where your image is stored. When you optimize a remote image, Cloudflare will pull the original image from the origin and store it in cache.
Hosted image	An image that is stored in Images. Cloudflare dynamically serves copies of your original image, optimized based on your requirements.
Parameter / Option	A parameter is a type of optimization that you can perform on an image. An option is the value for the parameter. For example, you can set the width parameter to a value of 100 to resize an image to a width of 100.
Variant	A predefined way to specify how a hosted image should be resized. For example, you can create a variant called "thumbnail" that sets image dimensions to 100x100. When you serve images with this variant, Cloudflare will serve a version of the original image that is resized to 100x100. Predefined variants specify a limited set of parameters: width, height, fit, and blur.