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Diagnosing error codes when delivering media with Cloudinary (video tutorial)

Last updated: Nov-24-2025

Overview

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to diagnose and resolve some of the most common errors you may encounter while delivering media using Cloudinary. You'll gain an overview of the most common client-side errors (400, 401, 404) and see how to inspect the error in the browser's developer tools or with the Cloudinary Media Inspector extension.

Video tutorial


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Tutorial contents

This tutorial presents the following topics. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

Introducing the x-cld-error header

Jump to this spot in the video 0:39 Whenever there is a client-side error, Cloudinary returns an HTTP header containing information about why the request failed. You can inspect this in any browser's developer tools - and find the x-cld-error header under the network tab.

Introducing the Cloudinary Media Inspector extension

Jump to this spot in the video 1:06 Cloudinary offers a browser extension called Media Inspector, where you can see the status code and other helpful information in the x-cld-error header. You can download this Cloudinary extension for free, and we'd recommend doing so if you haven't already! It is available in Chrome, and in other popular browsers, including Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

400: Bad Request

Jump to this spot in the video 1:34 A 400 - Bad Request error is returned when the delivery URL is invalid. You will receive a 400 error if you attempt to use a transformation key or value that doesn't exist or is not valid, or if you attempt to use transformation options that are syntactically correct, yet conflict with one another.

401: Unauthorized

Jump to this spot in the video 2:08 A 401 - Unauthorized error is returned when there is a restriction preventing the successful delivery of a requested asset. If you have Strict Transformations enabled and attempt to generate a derived on-the-fly transformation without a signature, attempt to use an add-on or feature that is set as restricted, attempt to access a private original asset, or apply a transformation to an authenticated asset without a valid signature, you will receive a 401 error.

404: Not Found

Jump to this spot in the video 2:55 A 404 - Not Found error means that the user can communicate with the server, but the server is unable to locate the requested asset in the specified cloud. Another common case is if your delivery URL is not in the proper format, for example if your cloud name is added after the resource type, or transformations are added after the public ID. Order matters with Cloudinary URLs.

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