Programmable Media
Digital Asset Management Overview
Last updated: Nov-16-2023
DAM introduction
Cloudinary's Digital Asset Management (DAM) products enable you and your creative and marketing teams to collaborate throughout all steps of your digital asset management workflow. From uploading photographers' photos and videos, to tagging and sharing them, performing sophisticated searches to find just the right assets for a particular new design or campaign, and up to the point that final assets are selected and ready to go live.
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Nexus and 
Assets are Cloudinary's Digital Asset Management (DAM) products.
- Nexus is designed for creative teams and small to medium-sized businesses that distribute their assets across campaigns, social media platforms, and various channels.
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Assets is designed for large organizations and enterprises delivering content to websites or apps. Assets, refined through Cloudinary's DAM by marketers, are then passed to developers. These developers can utilize Cloudinary's media management API to seamlessly transform and distribute the polished assets, ensuring optimized, rapid, and responsive delivery to customers.
Both products share common core DAM functionality and the information on this page and throughout the guide applies to both Nexus and Assets. Differences in features will be noted where relevant.
For more information, see Get started with Nexus and Get started with Assets.
- The DAM user guide provides comprehensive explanations of all DAM features.
- If you have a Cloudinary Master admin or Admin user role, it may be your responsibility to define the way the DAM will be used in your organization. The DAM administrator guide provides detailed information about a variety of DAM-related administration activities that you can perform.
We also invite you to check out our DAM video tutorials to learn more about getting started with Cloudinary DAM and the features it offers.
Cloudinary Console
You can use the the web-based Cloudinary Console to administer your Cloudinary account and product environments.
What's a product environment?
A product environment (previously known as a sub-account) is an entity within your account that includes an asset repository, some product environment-specific settings, and other elements that are stored in your product environment and help you manage it, such as upload presets, named transformations, and more.
A product environment can represent a production or staging environment, different organizations, products, or geographic sites that you want to manage separately within a single Cloudinary account.
- If you have Nexus, the product selector will show Nexus (DAM) .
- If you have Assets, the product selector will show Cloudinary Assets.
Users with the Media Library user and Media Library admin roles can't switch products.
This section describes the options available for Nexus and Assets. For details on working with Programmable Media, see the Programmable Media Service overview.
Assets Console
Nexus Console
Console Options
The following options are available from the Console Options sidebar, located at the far left of the Console:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
 |
Open the Product Explorer to learn about Cloudinary's product offerings, including descriptions, feature lists and insights into how each product can significantly enhance your workflow. |
| Product selector | Click the logo for the Cloudinary product you want to work with to display the navigation options for that product. |
| Add-ons | Manage your add-ons and upgrade add-on plans. Cloudinary add-ons provide additional functionality such as auto-tagging, automated asset moderation, anti-malware protection, AI, deep-learning and other analysis algorithms, face detection or recognition, and a variety of special transformation capabilities. Nearly all add-ons offer a free tier that you can try regardless of your plan. For details on all available add-ons, see Cloudinary Add-ons. |
| Invite new users | Add new users to your account. Learn more. |
| Help | Access a variety of resources to learn more about working with Cloudinary including documentation, get customer support, find training courses, read blog posts, and more. |
| Settings | Manage your personal profile, account-level settings, and product environment-level settings. These settings allow you to control and tweak almost every aspect of your asset pipeline behavior. |
| Profile avatar | Jump to your profile settings, invite friends to sign up for Cloudinary and earn extra credits, or log out of your account. |
DAM navigation options
When the Digital Asset Management product is selected, the following options may be available from the Product Navigation menu, depending on your user role.
While DAM administrators have access to all or most of the options, Media Library users are only able to to access the Media Library.
DAM options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Media Library | A UI for easily browsing and searching through your existing assets, drag & drop upload, and much more. For details, see Media Library features and the DAM user guide. |
| Studio | Easily apply transformations and AI-driven actions to multiple images through an intuitive interface. You can create variations and, if you're an admin, save templates for future downloads. For more information, see Studio. Note: This is a premium feature for Assets and its availability depends on your plan. |
| App Marketplace | A marketplace for selecting apps to extend your Media Library's core functionality. For more information, see Apps for DAM. |
| Structured Metadata | Create and manage a wide variety of structured metadata fields for your product environment. You can set a variety of options, including default values, mandatory fields, and conditional rules that dictate when a field or field value will be available. For more information, see Structured metadata. |
| Activity Reports | Generate a report that lists account management activities as well as all actions performed on tracking-enabled product environments. Note: This is a premium feature for both Assets and Nexus and its availability depends on your plan. |
| Preferences | Enables you to control the behavior and/or appearance of the Media Library, such as determining the way custom metadata is displayed and maintained or what is included in the results when you run an advanced search. For more information, see Media Library preferences. |
| Product environment switcher | Enables you to switch between the product environments or, depending on your role, create a new one. Note: Free accounts support only one product environment. |
Additional options for Assets only
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | Provides onboarding content for Assets users, including quick videos to help you upload, share, and transform your assets, as well as introductory information about other Cloudinary features and resources. |
| Transformations | Provides various options for generating and managing transformations, including the transformation builder. You can also create and manage transformation presets which can be used as templates in the Media Library that generate asset variations for preview and/or download at the click of a button. For details, see Named transformations. Note: This is a premium feature for both Assets and Nexus and its availability depends on your plan. |
Additional options for Nexus only
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Welcome | Walk through some Nexus features to help you get started. |
| Portals | Generate and manage media portals for publishing assets in the form of user-friendly and responsive web pages. For more information, see Media portals (Beta). |
| External Uploader (Upcoming Feature) | We have plans to introduce this feature! It will allow you to create a web page with a user-friendly interface for stakeholders to upload assets to Cloudinary. Opt to receive updates on its progress. |
| Dashboard | View summary details and trend graphs to help you analyze your overall DAM usage in terms of total assets, collection activity, and uploads. |
| Upgrade Plan | Unlock additional features and extend existing ones with self-serve upgrades. |
Media Library features
The Media Library provides you access to all your digital assets and is the main touch point into the Cloudinary's DAM products. All the features mentioned here are described in depth in the DAM user guide and apply to both Assets and Nexus.
From the Media Library you can:
- Switch between different Media Library views using the tabs at the top of the Media Library.
- Upload new images, videos, audio, or other files
- Create and navigate through folders or share folders with user groups
- Create and browse collections or share collections with user groups or external parties.
- Perform advanced searches
- Select multiple assets to perform bulk operations including delete, add/edit tags, move, download, or review moderated assets.
- Select a single asset to view or update basic asset details, view or activate advanced asset analysis operations, or to generate transformations for that asset.
Media Library views
From the Media Library, you'll be able to switch between a few common views using the Media Library Tabs:
- Home (Nexus only): Provides a quick and visual way to access common actions like searching and editing.
- Assets: Provides a flat display of all assets sorted by one of the selected sort options and enables Advanced Search of assets via a large variety of filters.
- Folders: Displays assets within their folder structure. Selecting this tab navigates you to the root folder.
- Collections: Displays assets within their respective collections.
- Moderation: Allows you to view and reject or approve assets in any stage of moderation. (You may or may not see this tab, depending on your user permissions.)
Supported browsers (DAM and Console UI)
The Cloudinary Media Library and other areas of the Console UI are designed to work with the latest web browsers. If you use an outdated browser, some DAM or Console features may not be available or may not work as expected. Additionally, using a modern browser can help keep your computer and data safer.
Therefore, we recommend that you use one of the following supported browsers:
| Chrome | Download | Update installed version |
| Firefox | Download | Update installed version |
| Safari* | Download | Update installed version |
| Edge | Download | (updates available from within the browser) |
- Internet Explorer: To enable us to take advantage of modern web functionality and to provide the best user experience, the Cloudinary Media Library and other areas of the Console UI can no longer be used from the Internet Explorer web browser.
- Safari: The Safari browser may not work well when accessing the Media Library from an external platform. Use one of the other recommended browsers listed above when working with Cloudinary via these integrations.
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