Generate multilingual alt text - detailed walkthrough (video tutorial)

Overview

Ready to build your own multilingual alt text automation in Cloudinary? This tutorial walks you through each block configuration step by step, so you can implement automated multilingual alt text generation using MediaFlows in your Cloudinary environment.

Video tutorial

Tutorial contents

This tutorial presents the following topics. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

Getting started

0:03	Ready to build your own multilingual alt text automation in Cloudinary? In this tutorial, we'll walk you through each block configuration step by step, so you can implement automated multilingual alt text generation using MediaFlows in your Cloudinary environment.

Prerequisites

0:22	Before we begin, make sure you have a Google Cloud project with the Translation API activated. You'll also need your Google API key ready for the translation functionality.

Creating the PowerFlow

0:32	Starting in the flows dashboard, create a new PowerFlow. This will be the foundation for our multilingual alt text automation that will trigger automatically when images are uploaded.

Configuring the Cloudinary Upload block

0:42	Set up the Cloudinary Upload block to monitor for asset uploads. Configure it to trigger when new images are uploaded to your Cloudinary environment, ensuring the flow activates automatically for every image upload.

Adding AI image analysis

1:04	Add a Cloudinary Image Captioning block to analyze the uploaded image content. This block generates a contextual description of the image in English, which will serve as the foundation for all translations.

Saving the description to contextual metadata

1:39	Set up an Update Contextual Metadata block to save the English description to the alt metadata field.

Setting up Google Translation

2:18	Configure Google Translate blocks for each target language (French, Spanish, German). Each block takes the English description and translates it to the specified language, creating multilingual alt text options.

Saving the translations to contextual metadata

2:54	Set up Update Contextual Metadata blocks to save each translation to its corresponding metadata field (such as alt_french, alt_spanish, and alt_german).

Testing the flow

3:51	Test the flow by uploading a sample image. Watch as the automation processes the image, generates the English description, translates it to multiple languages, and saves all versions to the contextual metadata.

Viewing the results

4:30	Check the results in your Media Library. The contextual metadata now contains the original alt text in English, plus alt_french, alt_spanish, and alt_german fields with translations, ready for serving localized accessible content.

Enabling the flow

4:50	Once testing confirms everything works as expected, enable the flow. Now the flow will be triggered automatically whenever anyone uploads an image to this product environment, generating multilingual alt text for every image upload.

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