How to Make Preset Cloudinary Transformations Available to Django Template Tags

Cloudinary preset (or named) transformations are powerful ways to group together dynamic alterations to your images. For example, you can create a "default" transformation for your website:

DEFAULT = dict(
    format='auto', 
    quality='auto:good', 
    width='auto',
)

The problem is, how do you make that transformation available to all of your {% cloudinary %} template tags? The Cloudinary Django Sample App has a nice solution for this: put the transformations in a template context processor.

# context_processors.py
def cloudinary_transformations(request):
    return dict(
        DEFAULT = dict(
            format='auto', 
            quality='auto:good', 
            width='auto',
        )
    )

# settings.py
TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                ...
                'your_app.context_processors.cloudinary_transformations',
            ],
        },
    },
]

Now the transformation is available across all of your templates:

    <div>{% cloudinary image_id1 DEFAULT %}</div>
    ...
    <div>{% cloudinary image_id2 DEFAULT %}</div>

You can put additional "standard" transformations in the context processor, and you can also specify additional alterations in the template tags when needed:

    <div>{% cloudinary image_id1 DEFAULT %}</div>
    ...
    <div>{% cloudinary image_id2 THUMBNAIL gravity='north_west' ... %}</div>