---
# System prepended metadata

title: How Fileboy works

---

# How Fileboy works

### File handling can be a giant headache for developers. Many tools are old and outdated, and many modern hosting solutions offer no infrastructure for storage.

Also, it can be expensive, both as a time cost and infrastructure cost to process files. Uploading takes a long time, can be unstable and is difficult to debug if not working as required.

Fileboy is designed to seamlessly integrate with your front end web or application interface to make uploading files a breeze. Displaying and editing those files is then a breeze, with a simple URL you can reference or widgets you can use.

There are four steps in the Fileboy pipeline to get files stored and delivered to your application.

1. Uploading your file
2. Storage
3. Processing
4. Delivery

## Upload your files
There are a few different ways to upload to Fileboy. We have an easy to use [API](https://), a few different [libraries](https://), and a [Fileboy Widget](https://). You can use any of these to upload one or more files.

All of these ways are super quick to get started - in fact you can try them out right now using our [demo](https://).

When you upload a video you are given back a Fileboy ID. This ID is all you need to store nad is used for all interactions for the file.

## Storage
After uploading your file its stored and cached. Simple as that - no setting up storage, no configuring. We have a couple of rules in the storage regarding how long we hold on to different files and how we cache them. You can change these up in your account settings. 

[Read more about how Fileboy storage works](https://)

## Media processing
Fileboy lets you process files on the run. When requesting an image file, you can:
* Change height and width
* Crop in different configs
* Recolor
* Watermark
* Change format
* Change backgrounds
* And more...

[Try it out in our image playground.](https://)

When uploading videos, we process those into various bitrates for serving different sizes of videos.

## Delivery
Getting the files served to your application is simply a case of using the Fileboy ID to grab the file. 

```
https://fileboy.io/files/[:your_id]
```

And to get the right version, simply include your options.

```
https://fileboy.io/files/[:your_id]?height:400&width:200&format:png
```

We also include a number of widgets to deliver the files in the most efficient ways possible. For example, our [video player](https://) provides a great experience, with adaptive bitrates to serve any connection.

## Time to get started

You can [sign up](https://) now and get started with our free plan. Theres a few different things to play with and you should be able to start uploading and serving files in minutes!

