If your work involves managing large amounts of images and videos, you know that the challenge isn’t just saving these files. The real challenge is making sure they’re easy to find, use, and share across teams, efficiently. If your current system for handling all these digital assets feels more like a disorganized closet than a smart assistant, then this post is for you. Cloudinary offers more than just storage for your images and videos. It actively makes your content creation, distribution, and management more effective and faster. A significant part of this capability comes from Cloudinary’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications, specialized tools designed to make your visual media tasks smoother, quicker, and perfectly suited to your needs. In this post, we’ll take a look at what DAM apps are and how they can help us.
Cloudinary’s Media Library provides a strong foundation for managing your digital assets. The DAM apps enhance this by offering a more advanced layer of functionality that streamline, automate, and customize how you handle your digital content.
We know what these apps are, but why should we actually use them? The short answer is: They make our work faster, easier, and more impactful. Cloudinary’s DAM apps are powerful tools that can truly transform how your team manages their digital assets:
- Automate tedious editing tasks. Instead of manually resizing images for different platforms or creating contact sheets, your team can focus on creative work instead of repetitive chores. They also help maintain consistency across all your visual media, applying standardized transformations and metadata so that everything aligns perfectly with your brand, no matter where it appears.
- Make collaboration as smooth as possible. With assets well-organized and workflows streamlined, teammates can easily find, share, and use the right content, without digging through folders or dealing with version confusion. And when it comes to boosting content performance, Product Gallery and Video Player Studio give your visuals a real edge, making your content more engaging and effective. These benefits combine to make your media management more strategic and less tedious.
DAM apps can only be enabled by the account administrator. For detailed instructions on how to enable the apps, see the documentation. Once the apps are enabled by your administrator, they become available. To use one, simply select your desired assets, and then pick the app from the options menu, which you’ll find by clicking the 3-dots icon in the assets toolbar. Let’s explore the various apps and see how they can be beneficial to you.
You’re a photographer and you’ve just wrapped up a massive photoshoot. The next step is uploading hundreds of images that need to be reviewed and edited, perhaps with different crops or watermarks, before sharing them for approval.
With the Contact Sheet App, you can create visual grid layouts of your images. Apply different transformations (now called templates) and download the transformed assets as a ZIP file.
Benefit: Get an overview of many images at once, create polished sheets for presentations, and easily get your assets ready for printing.
Say you need 50 images, all resized to fit a specific banner, and another 50 for Instagram stories, each with a consistent filter. It will be quite stressful doing that one after the other. The Download Transformed Assets App is the right tool for this. Select a bunch of assets, choose a transformation preset, and that’s all! You can download a ZIP file of all your selected assets, perfectly transformed and ready for use. Benefit: Ensure every asset looks exactly as it should, and save hours otherwise spent on repetitive, manual edits. This app also allows you to download all these transformed assets at once.
Metadata might sound a bit dry, but trust me, it’s the backbone of any organized DAM. How was the asset delivered to the library? When was it created? What type of asset? This information makes your assets findable and usable. The Export Asset Metadata App allows you to download a CSV file containing all selected metadata and delivery URLs for your assets. Benefit: This app shines when you need to keep track of your asset library or generate insights into your content. It’s also helpful for exporting bulk metadata for auditing or reporting.
The MediaFlows App is a powerful automation tool. It shows you all the flows you’ve created and allows you to select and run them on selected files. Whether you’re a non-technical marketing pro or a seasoned developer, MediaFlows lets you build automated workflows without writing a single line of code (EasyFlows) or with a little low-code magic (PowerFlows).
Imagine automatically tagging images and moving them to specific folders based on that tag. Or making sure all your “private” assets stay private. EasyFlows lets you set up triggers and actions with a super-intuitive, step-by-step builder, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks and ensure the same rules are always followed without writing a single line of code!
For those who want deeper customization, PowerFlows offers a flexible, visual environment that allows you to connect functional blocks and build complex workflows. You can even configure error notifications so that errors are sent to the provided URL when a workflow fails. This is perfect for integrating with your larger tech stack.
MediaFlows is a powerful tool because it lets you build sophisticated workflows like:
- Image optimization on upload. Automatically resize, crop, and optimize every image.
- Video transcoding. Convert videos to different formats for various platforms.
- AI-powered content moderation. Automatically flag inappropriate content.
- Syncing with your PIM/CMS. Push updated assets directly to your product information or content management systems. Benefit: MediaFlows transforms Cloudinary into the central nervous system for your entire media supply chain. It’s less about managing assets and more about orchestrating their journey from creation to consumption, intelligently and automatically.
If you’re in e-commerce or marketing, you know how crucial visually appealing product showcases are. The Product Gallery App generates a beautiful demo page for your product gallery, complete with images, videos, and even spinsets! It automatically generates the embed code, making it a breeze to drop into your website or e-commerce platform.
Benefit: Create interactive and dynamic product views that can be easily embedded into websites by just copying and pasting the generated code.
Getting a video to play perfectly across all devices and platforms can be a headache. Cloudinary’s Video Player is robust, and the Video Player Studio App gives you ultimate control. This app lets you create a demo page to showcase your videos using Cloudinary’s player. You can preview different settings and configurations, and then automatically generate the embed code. Benefit: You can experiment with the various settings before going live, so your video shows up the same way you’d expect it to.
Cloudinary’s DAM Apps are powerful tools that make your life easier and your visual media workflows more efficient. From simplifying creative reviews to automating complex processes and ensuring consistent content delivery across all channels, these apps empower you to get the most out of your digital assets.
