On-the-fly image transformations are iffy.

January 2, 2026

Trying to use CloudFlare Image Transformations to resize images on the fly. The feature is cool, but the results are pretty weak. Given an optimized WebP source image, CloudFlare's transformations seem to just serve a bigger, lower-quality JPEG version of the image when resizing up. Not really sure why, but... that defeats the whole point of the service.

And as for the OpenGraph images, CloudFlare seems to struggle with getting decently-compressed PNG outputs from WebP sources. My original PNGs that had been run through Oxipng were smaller than CloudFlare's WebP-to-PNG conversions.

The whole thing has made me realize this stuff should really stay a build-time operation, not something done on-the-fly at request time. The quality just isn't there. It's a shame though, because it would've been so convenient.