Image transforms returning cpresources url
That’s what getUrl() returns if the transform hasn’t been generated yet. When the browser requests that URL, Craft will generate the transform, and respond with a 302 redirect to the actual image URL.

Update: As of Craft 2.2, even if the transform generation URL doesn’t get directly requested (e.g. if it’s a social media image, or a srcset size that doesn’t apply to the browser), it will still get generated automatically as a background task as soon as Craft is done serving the page.

The next time getUrl() gets called (after the transform has been generated), the image URL will be returned directly.

If you would prefer that getUrl() actually generates the transform itself and immediately returns the image URL (perhaps because the output is getting cached by Varnish or something), you can open up craft/config/general.php and add this to your config array:

'generateTransformsBeforePageLoad' =&gt; true,


(See http://buildwithcraft.com/docs/config-settings#generateTransformsBeforePageLoad for details.)