{"id":30393,"date":"2023-07-11T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/?p=30393"},"modified":"2025-11-27T11:37:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T19:37:48","slug":"automatically-and-programmatically-update-assets-metadata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/automatically-and-programmatically-update-assets-metadata","title":{"rendered":"How to Automatically and Programmatically Update Assets Based on Metadata"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Oftentimes you may find yourself flipping between databases, marketing releases, and media assets while trying to remember when one thing changes to update everything else.

Cloudinary makes this process a whole lot easier. Instead of manually create a new version of a product image when pricing, availability, dates, quantity, or anything else changes, you can just reference your asset’s metadata for the text overlays in your on-the-fly transformation, and the changes happen automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Image<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Reference the asset’s structured metadata<\/a> field in your transformation via the standard URL transformation API<\/a> or via one of Cloudinary\u2019s SDK<\/a> helper functions by utilizing user-defined variables<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Add Metadata to Delivery URLs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Want to reference an asset\u2019s structured metadata in your transformation and add text layers? Here\u2019s a breakdown:<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Image<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

1. Create a few structured metadata fields. You can create, update, and delete these either via the UI or the Metadata API<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Media<\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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\"Create<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

For this example, you’ll create three structured metadata fields: price, description, and stock number.

2. Add metadata value specifics of this asset via the UI or API. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Metadata<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

3. Now you’re ready to build your URL on-the-fly transformation. First, declare user-defined variables<\/a> so that you can reference them later in the transformation. The basic structure of defining metadata as a variable will be ${variable_name}_md:!{metadata_field}!<\/code>. Afterwards, you can incorporate these variables in a few text layers<\/a> in the asset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a breakdown of each section of the final URL:<\/p>\n\n\n\n