Managing individual media assets

When you select an asset card (thumbnail) in the main page of the Media Library, you can do the following:

• Single-click the asset to view or edit asset details, including easily renaming the asset, in the Preview pane, which is displayed on the right side of the screen.
• Select the asset and perform any of the operations available in the asset toolbar (such as delete, add tags, move, download or moderate).
• Copy the asset's delivery URL.
• Manage the asset on the drill-down page to view or edit summary, metadata, and analysis data.
• Edit the asset on the edit page where you can also generate sophisticated image or video transformations. You can also double-click the asset to reach this page.

Asset management drill-down

The asset management drill-down page enables you to view, set, or adjust summary, metadata, and analysis data for a specific media asset.

You can open the asset management drill-down page by clicking the Manage button from a variety of locations, including the asset card buttons, the Preview pane, and the Edit page.

Summary tab

Enables you to view basic details about the asset and to manually update the tag list or public ID (asset name). The tags shown in this tab include tags automatically added by auto-tagging add-ons, either programatically or via the Analysis tab.

Metadata tab

Enables you to add or edit custom metadata for the asset.

Analysis tab

Relevant for images only. Enables you to view the results of automated AI analyses that have already been performed on the asset. Cloudinary runs some of these analyses automatically on every asset. Others require registration to an add-on. If you are not already registered for a particular add-on, you can register for the add-on's free tier and run the engine on the displayed asset directly from this pane.

All analysis data is stored with your asset and can be used as the basis for a variety of asset management features:

• Auto-tagging - Utilizes one or more auto-tagging add-ons, each of which apply deep learning AI models to identify types of objects in your image and return the list of categories it finds. You can adjust the confidence level to view additional categories or limit the list to those with a higher confidence level. You can then mark specific categories to add them as tags on your asset, or choose the option to add all the displayed categories as tags.

• Face and Celebrity detection - Utilizes various algorithms and AI engines to determine the number and location of faces in your image. For celebrity detection, it also indicates the names of any celebrities detected and the accuracy confidence level. Each face/celebrity detection option displays the coordinates of the faces it finds in the form of color-coded frames within the preview pane on the right. You can use the show/hide buttons for each engine to show or hide these frames. The detected faces data can be used for a number of face-detection options. For example, this data can be used to add overlays to every captured face, to blur or pixelate faces, or to apply face-detection based cropping so that you never crop out a face, and more. For the built-in face detection, you also have the option to adjust, add, or remove face coordinates (frames) and save the new face data with your image.

• Area of interest - Enables you to define a custom-area of interest. This area will then be taken into account, or in some cases override other special areas, when Cloudinary programmatically crops, applies overlays, or performs other area-based transformations.

• OCR - Captures text inside your images. Each phrase (line of text) that it captures is displayed in the tab and highlighted in the preview pane. Similar to face-detection, you can add overlays to cover text, blur or pixelate text, or ensure that text doesn't get cut off if your images are automatically cropped for delivery.

• Color analysis - Gives you information about the main colors in your image. Cloudinary can use these colors to automatically add background padding to images in a color that looks good with your image. If you have access to the Image Analysis tab (premium) of the Media Library's advanced search, you can search for images based on their predominant colors. And of-course your developers can retrieve these colors to implement color-related functionality in your application.

Asset and transformation editing

The Edit page enables you to experiment with the various transformations available for the selected image or video using simple UI elements in the transformation editor and to view and edit asset details.

Using the transformation editor

The most common transformations are displayed on the page. There are 3 additional links you can click to create more complex transformations:

• More options: Set additional transformations or transformation flags.
• Add overlay & watermark: Specify another asset in your Media Library to add as an overlay (or underlay) on the current asset, and specify transformations to apply to the selected overlay asset. You can also click the More options link within the overlay section to access additional transformations for the overlay.
• Chain another transformation: Chaining enables you to define another set of transformations that will be applied on the result of the first set.

When you change settings on any of the transformation controls, a button is displayed on the preview prompting you to generate the derived resource and refresh the preview. In most cases, it makes sense to first set all the transformation settings you want to apply, and only then refresh the preview. When you refresh the preview, the transformation code displayed below the preview is also updated, enabling you to copy the transformation URL or the transformation code for any SDK.

A derived resource is one that is generated from the original asset based on applied transformations. It does not change the original asset, nor is it treated as a new asset in your Media Library. You can view all derived resources that were generated from a particular asset by clicking the View derived image/video button at the top of the Edit page.

For details on all available transformations and how they are used within delivery URLs, see the Image transformations and Video transformations guides.

Editing asset details

From the Edit page, users with a role that includes edit permissions for the asset can adjust data that is stored with your asset, including:

• Rename the asset's public ID - The public ID is the filename used in delivery URLs. If you change a public ID of an asset that is currently in production, it will break all existing links to that asset.
• Manually add or modify tags and metadata - Tags and metadata can be used in advanced searches to help you find relevant assets and may also be used in some complex transformations. For example, conditional transformations may apply one transformation if an asset has a specific tag or metadata value associated with it, and otherwise apply a different transformation. You can also automatically generate tags for assets in the Analysis tab of the Asset Management drill-down page, using one of the auto-tagging add-ons.
• Add or edit face or custom coordinates. These coordinates are used to determine the area of focus for cropping, overlays, and other transformation features when the gravity parameter is set to face/faces or custom in a delivery URL.
• Set an override quality level for a specific asset. The absolute quality level set here will be used for that asset instead of Cloudinary's auto-quality algorithm when quality is set to auto in a delivery URL.

Users with an Admin role or with Can Manage permissions for the relevant folder can also Delete the asset.