Our last Mini-Hack started with a constraint.
Build something that makes the web lighter, faster, and more sustainable.
For June, we tried the opposite.
No theme. No prescribed problem. No expectation that every submission should look or work the same.
We gave the Cloudinary Creators community a new toolkit, one simple requirement, and as much creative freedom as possible:
Use at least one skill from the Cloudinary Skills Pack and build something real.
Solo or with a partner. Small experiment or ambitious product. Developer tool, creative platform, healthcare app, media editor, or something we had never considered.
The result was five projects that went in five completely different directions.
That was exactly the point.
The Brief Was Almost No Brief
The challenge was called Open Innovation with the Cloudinary Skills Pack.
The instructions were deliberately simple:
- Build anything you want.
- Use at least one Cloudinary AI skill.
- Focus on utility.
- Keep the scope manageable.
- Show the community what you made.
Creators could submit a live demo, public repository, project write-up, or walkthrough video.
There was no shared industry, audience, or use case. We wanted creators to start with problems they personally cared about, then explore how Cloudinary could help them solve those problems.
Meet the Cloudinary Skills Pack
The Mini-Hack centered on the newly launched Cloudinary Skills Pack, a collection of agent skills designed to help AI coding tools work more accurately with images, videos, transformations, and Cloudinary SDKs.
The pack included three skills:
cloudinary-docs
Grounds AI agents in Cloudinary documentation so they can provide more accurate implementation guidance instead of relying on outdated patterns or guessing.
cloudinary-transformations
Turns natural-language transformation requests into valid Cloudinary image and video transformation URLs.
Describe what you want, such as removing a background, resizing an image, generating a crop, or applying an effect, and the skill helps translate that request into a usable transformation.
cloudinary-react
Provides current Cloudinary React SDK guidance, including component patterns, package usage, and correct import paths.
Together, the skills give AI coding agents a better understanding of how media workflows should actually be built.
Our pitch to the community was simple:
Here is a toolkit for building AI experiences that understand media. Now show us a use case we have not thought of yet.
Support Along the Way
Open-ended challenges create freedom, but they can also create uncertainty.
To help creators move from ideas to finished projects, we hosted a live Office Hours session on Discord. Participants could bring Skills Pack questions, implementation problems, deployment issues, or unfinished ideas.
Community members and mentors worked through errors, discussed project scope, and helped builders polish their submissions before the deadline.
Then came the final push.
Submissions officially closed on July 5.
Participants were competing for:
- A Cloudinary swag pack
- AI credits for future projects
- A featured place in the Cloudinary Community Showcase
- Promotion across Cloudinary social channels
Five Projects, Five Completely Different Directions
Removing the theme did not make the projects feel disconnected.
Instead, it revealed what our creators were already interested in solving.
They built media editors, optimization platforms, recovery journals, developer copilots, and branding assistants.
The projects shared the same toolkit, but almost nothing else.
CloudCanvas, by Joyston
What would a Photoshop or Canva-style editor look like if Cloudinary powered the entire media workflow?
That is the question behind CloudCanvas.
CloudCanvas is an AI-powered image editor that runs directly in the browser. It uses a non-destructive, layer-based canvas, allowing users to upload images, generate new visuals, apply edits, and export optimized assets without leaving the application.
Its editing tools include:
- Smart Expand
- Object Removal
- Background Removal
- AI Restore
- Artistic filters
- AI image generation
- Optimized media exports
Rather than demonstrating a single Cloudinary transformation, CloudCanvas combines several capabilities into one complete creative workflow.
It was also the first submission we received, setting a strong pace for the rest of the challenge.
Explore the project:
Snap Optimizer AI, by Aashi
Some projects solve one media problem extremely well.
Snap Optimizer AI solves several.
Aashi built an all-in-one image optimization platform that brings enhancement, editing, compression, resizing, and asset creation into one interface.
Users can:
- Enhance image quality using AI
- Remove backgrounds
- Compress large image files
- Resize and crop images intelligently
- Generate passport photos
- Create profile pictures
- Prepare assets for Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn
- Enter prompts for custom transformations
- Compare images before and after optimization
The platform was built with Python, Flask, Cloudinary AI, and the cloudinary-transformations skill.
The skill allows users to describe an intended result in natural language, then helps convert that request into a real Cloudinary transformation workflow.
Snap Optimizer AI stood out because it was not just a demonstration. It felt like a practical tool that creators, marketers, developers, and everyday users could immediately understand.
Explore the project:
Eirene, by Nivrithi
While the other submissions focused primarily on media creation and developer productivity, Eirene applied the technology to a deeply human problem.
Eirene is a postpartum recovery companion built around an often-overlooked reality: while the arrival of a baby is widely celebrated, the mother’s physical and emotional recovery can receive far less attention.
The platform helps mothers document and understand their recovery through:
- Week-by-week recovery tracking
- Mood tracking
- Daily reflections
- Personalized affirmations
- Recovery milestones
- A visual recovery timeline
- Photo memories with calming effects
Cloudinary powers the image upload experience and visual effects, helping users preserve recovery memories inside the journal.
The project was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Cloudinary transformations skill.
Eirene showed that media tools do not need to be limited to marketing, design, or developer workflows. They can also support reflection, memory, wellbeing, and personal storytelling.
The community response reflected that. As Jen Looper shared during the showcase, this project particularly resonated.
Explore the project:
CreatorPilot AI, by Ved Prakash Arya
Ved Prakash Arya, founder of Snapforest, built CreatorPilot AI after repeatedly running into the same problem.
Learning and experimenting with Cloudinary often meant switching between documentation, transformation generators, SDK examples, media management tools, and several browser tabs.
CreatorPilot AI brings those experiences into one workspace.
The platform includes:
- An AI Documentation Assistant
- A Transformation Studio
- A React SDK Playground
- A Media Manager
- An AI Image Generator
It supports workflows such as:
- Background removal
- Automatic image enhancement
- Image upscaling
- Generative fill
- Background replacement
- Object removal
CreatorPilot AI was the only submission to use all three skills from the Cloudinary Skills Pack.
It was built with React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, @cloudinary/react, and @cloudinary/url-gen.
The result is part learning environment, part experimentation platform, and part developer productivity tool.
Explore the project:
Brandify, by Princess Bube
Brandify started with a problem Princess had encountered during her consulting work.
Maintaining a consistent visual identity across dozens of images, formats, campaigns, and platforms is difficult, especially when every business has its own branding rules.
Brandify allows a user to upload a brand style guide alongside a collection of images. The platform then generates asset variations that follow the brand’s documented colors, visual direction, and presentation requirements.
Claude reads and interprets the brand guide, while Cloudinary generates the required image derivatives.
Brandify also includes a second workflow for technical content.
Users can upload a draft blog post, and the application scans the Cloudinary URLs embedded inside it. It identifies missing optimizations and rewrites the URLs using Cloudinary delivery best practices.
That combination makes Brandify both a creative branding assistant and a media optimization tool.
Explore the project:
Taking the Projects Live
On July 10, our creators presented their projects during a live judging session streamed across LinkedIn and YouTube.
This was not just a slideshow of finished products.
Each creator walked through the problem they had chosen, how they approached it, where the Skills Pack helped, and what they had managed to build within the challenge window.
The judges evaluated every project using four criteria:
- Creativity
- Practical usefulness
- Effective use of the Cloudinary Skills Pack
- Overall execution
The live format gave the broader community an opportunity to watch the demos, ask questions, celebrate the builders, and see what the Skills Pack could enable beyond a standard tutorial.
Missed the session?
And the Winner Is…
For our previous Earth Month Mini-Hack, we celebrated every valid submission without selecting a single winner.
This time, we chose one.
Congratulations to Aashi, winner of the Cloudinary Creators June Mini-Hack for Snap Optimizer AI.
The project stood out for combining an impressive range of genuinely useful features into one polished and accessible experience.
It covered enhancement, compression, background removal, intelligent resizing, social media asset creation, passport photo generation, prompt-based transformations, and before-and-after comparisons.
Most importantly, the project demonstrated how the Cloudinary Transformations skill could move beyond a developer experiment and become part of an experience that real users could immediately understand.
Aashi will receive:
- Cloudinary swag
- AI credits
- A featured place in the Community Showcase
- Promotion across Cloudinary social channels
Congratulations on an incredibly well-executed project.
What This Mini-Hack Proved
Our Earth Month challenge showed what happens when you give developers a narrow problem and a clear constraint.
The June Mini-Hack showed what happens when you do the opposite.
Give creators a capable toolkit and enough freedom, and they do not necessarily scatter. They build around the problems they already understand.
A consulting challenge became a branding assistant.
Too many documentation tabs became a developer copilot.
An interest in creative editing became a browser-based media studio.
A need for simpler optimization became an all-in-one image platform.
A deeply personal healthcare gap became a recovery journal.
Five creators started with the same Skills Pack and arrived at five completely different products.
That range is not a side effect of the challenge.
It is the strongest result.
The best way to understand what a new developer tool can enable is often to release it into the hands of builders, step back, and see where they take it.
What’s Next
You probably know how this section ends.
We are doing it again.
The next Cloudinary Creators challenge is already taking shape, and we will share the full details with the community soon.
Until then, explore the projects, watch the judging session, and start thinking about what you might build when the next challenge opens.
Stay Connected With the Cloudinary Creators Community
Applications for the current Cloudinary Creators cohort are now closed, and our focus is on supporting the creators already participating in the program.
You can still follow what the community is building, explore the projects from this Mini-Hack, and stay updated on future challenges and opportunities.
Learn more about the Cloudinary Creators program:
https://cloudinary.com/developers/community
Join our Discord community to meet other builders, get project feedback, and hear about upcoming Mini-Hacks:
https://discord.com/invite/D8ddQj6KnH
Work through the Cloudinary Creators curriculum:
https://training.cloudinary.com/pages/c2c
Explore the Cloudinary Skills Pack:
https://github.com/cloudinary-devs/skills
The next challenge has not started yet.
Your next project can.
| Cloudinary ❤️ developers |
|---|
| Ready to level up your media workflow? Start using Cloudinary for free and build better visual experiences today. |
| 👉 Create your free account |
Top comments (0)