Let’s take a moment and journey back to the days when Cloudinary was a tiny startup run by a few gifted people coding hard to keep enhancing their product with a single mission in mind: make life better for the developers who entrusted their media with Cloudinary. Working out of a living room in early-startup-style and swagger was fun. For one thing, holding a company meeting took only a short trip to the local pub together for a beer 🍻.
We’ve moved on from those days. Our team, still gifted but too big to fit into a pub, now anticipates a continuing growth of the company with many more members as we continue to cater to media-management needs, notably through robust and effective Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.
Gratifyingly, though Cloudinary is no longer an exclusively developer-oriented company, its spirit persists with a laser focus on agility and usability. During a recent powwow, we concluded that we needed a workaround for the less-than-ideal scenario that some of our Uber-cool features were not automated or were accessible only through APIs. “What about a simple, non-API-centric way to make bulk changes to the structured metadata in the Cloudinary accounts?” we wondered.
A few beers and a few hours later, we had the code ready for that idea and decided right then to do what we do best: share it with the open-source community. We named the tool Meta Pop, short for metadata populator. Here is the source code on GitHub.
With Meta Pop, which is hosted on Heroku, you can update the metadata of the assets in your Cloudinary account in either of these two simple ways:
- Upload the updates to a folder structure that contains the metadata.
- Upload a CSV file with the most up-to-date metadata.
Given the high volume of data, Meta Pop feeds it all into a free Elastic + Kibana instance to facilitate search. For more helpful search results, Meta Pop leverages a free instance of Coralogix, a tool built by a technology company of the same name that specializes in processing of data logs. Here, Coralogix funnels the logged data from Meta Pop into an Elasticsearch instance, in which you can then either search for metadata in the normal way or, for clues to help with debugging, run grep on the live logs as they show up.
Meta Pop does a creditable job of simplifying and accelerating many metadata-related tasks. Why not take it for a spin?