Cloudinary Blog

Automate Your Media Assets’ Workflow With Machine Learning

Automate Your Media Assets’ Workflow With Machine Learning

Automating the organization of your website’s media assets (images and videos) saves time and money, boosting the usefulness and lengthening the life span of those assets. Cloudinary’s artificial intelligence (AI) driven automatic tagging, transcription, and moderation capabilities ably and efficiently handle that automation for you—at scale.

A Typical Enterprise Scenario and the Related Challenges

Picture this: you are the CEO of a large international company in the travel sector, on par with Expedia, Trivago, Priceline, Airbnb, and such. On your content-creation team are many contributors of dynamite media assets. Some of those assets are generated internally by your creative team; the others, externally by partners and site visitors who leave reviews on their vacation spots. Your worldwide audiences speak many different languages. And, as a key promotional strategy, your marketing team regularly spotlights interviews of and contributions from customers and partners online.

That scenario brings forth numerous content-related issues, three of which stand out as being the most challenging:

  • Organization. The sheer volume of content that pours in around the clock calls for timely and expert reviews, let alone meticulous organization that complies with your site template and design.
  • Localization. Translating the related text to accommodate your multinational audience is paramount. Also, ensuring accuracy of the translation is a tough nut to crack.
  • Moderation of reviews. As your company grows, manual reviews of all incoming content becomes labor-intensive and impracticable. How do you moderate it all?

AI and machine learning can perform these three tasks to help automate the day-to-day workflow of your media assets and solve the above challenges:

  1. Auto-tag media assets for ready retrieval and reuse.
  2. Localize the assets’ content.
  3. Deliver an engaging, well-moderated experience to your audience.

The Solutions

For each of the three problems, supplement your workflow tasks with AI, eliminating at least part of the manual load.

For Problem #1: Organization

Content that is logically and seamlessly organized means that it’s at your fingertips, eminently searchable and reusable. To make that happen, tag the content.

By taking advantage of Cloudinary’s auto-tagging add-on solutions, such as Amazon Rekognition or Google Vision for images; and Microsoft Azure or Google Automatic Video Tagging for videos, you can generate AI-driven analyses as reference for tagging and organizing your content. Subsequently, search and retrieval of content according to the tags is a breeze. Furthermore, you can redirect your audience to similar content and suggest that your marketing team retrieve and spotlight content with, for example, the keyword “fun” or “beach.” The horizon opened up by meticulous organization as a result of intelligent tagging is endless.

For Problem #2: Localization

Localization is a paramount issue, solving which would ensure that your digital media is usable by a worldwide audience.

Cloudinary’s video transcription tools automatically transcribe videos and place them in your Media Library on Cloudinary. Afterwards, you can edit the transcriptions for accuracy, translate them, and save them back into the Media Library, ready for use.

Plus, you can add subtitles to localize your media for your various global audiences, further customizing them to fit your brand and website.

It also makes sense to capitalize on the usefulness of tags for localization. You can translate tags by means of the Google Translation add-on in conjunction with any of the auto-tagging mechanisms to localize search and make available the search results to your global teams. The process is simple, intuitive, and fast.

For Problem #3: Moderation

Before tackling moderation, first identify your goal for the task.

Typically, you would want to eliminate adult content, which you can easily do with Cloudinary’s moderation tools. You should also moderate for high visual quality and on-brand assets so that your site is appealing, crisp, and free of superfluous content.

To accomplish that, you have two choices:

  • Authorize Cloudinary to perform advanced analysis on your image uploads and programmatically filter out duplicate or low-quality content.
  • Adopt the premium image-analysis feature in Cloudinary’s Digital Asset Management system for a seamless extraction of that content.

Conclusion

Auto-tagging media assets goes a long way in helping you manage them, opening many doors for you. For the two questions below, you can then answer the first one in detail and the second one with a resounding yes:

  • What rich-media content do you have on hand?
  • Can you reuse that content?

With those answers, you can—

  • Easily pull digital media you already have and post them as stand-ins.
  • Effortlessly locate media from your collection by searching with a few keywords.
  • Recommend similar pages of importance to customers or enhance the search capabilities of your site through your tags.

Recall also how AI can generate transcription files and translated tags, ushering in a multitude of benefits:

  • Studies have shown that people are accessing media from mobile phones more often than from desktops, hence frequently watching videos on mute. That means you must deliver the same value for your videos regardless of the playing device.
  • With all that AI output, you can localize content, beef up your site’s accessibility, and expand outreach.
  • To better support customers, you can enhance search capabilities by capitalizing on multilingual tags.

Finally, remember that moderating for a meaningful, outstanding user experience means more than filtering out adult content. You can also do the following:

  • Leverage blurriness, grayscale, or illustration detection to achieve brand integrity.
  • Delete duplicate images for a well-organized, orderly, intuitive, and easy-to-manage system.
  • Further hone the images you retain, such as those of multiple faces, by grouping them according to family, predominant colors, and other significant criteria.

AI and machine learning are all about pruning repetitive or manual tasks. Do take advantage of those technologies and the related tools, in particular those from Cloudinary, to make well-founded decisions and optimize workflows, freeing up your teams to focus on the true business drivers.


Want to Learn More About Digital Asset Management?

Recent Blog Posts

Our $2B Valuation

By
Blackstone Growth Invests in Cloudinary

When we started our journey in 2012, we were looking to improve our lives as developers by making it easier for us to handle the arduous tasks of handling images and videos in our code. That initial line of developer code has evolved into a full suite of media experience solutions driven by a mission that gradually revealed itself over the course of the past 10 years: help companies unleash the full potential of their media to create the most engaging visual experiences.

Read more
Direct-to-Consumer E-Commerce Requires Compelling Visual Experiences

When brands like you adopt a direct–to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce approach with no involvement of retailers or marketplaces, you gain direct and timely insight into evolving shopping behaviors. Accordingly, you can accommodate shoppers’ preferences by continually adjusting your product offering and interspersing the shopping journey with moments of excitement and intrigue. Opportunities abound for you to cultivate engaging customer relationships.

Read more
Automatically Translating Videos for an International Audience

No matter your business focus—public service, B2B integration, recruitment—multimedia, in particular video, is remarkably effective in communicating with the audience. Before, making video accessible to diverse viewers involved tasks galore, such as eliciting the service of production studios to manually dub, transcribe, and add subtitles. Those operations were costly and slow, especially for globally destined content.

Read more
Cloudinary Helps Minted Manage Its Image-Generation Pipeline at Scale

Shoppers return time and again to Minted’s global online community of independent artists and designers because they know they can count on unique, statement-making products of the highest quality there. Concurrently, the visual imagery on Minted.com must do justice to the designs into which the creators have poured their hearts and souls. For Minted’s VP of Engineering David Lien, “Because we are a premium brand, we need to ensure that every single one of our product images matches the selected configuration exactly. For example, if you pick an 18x24 art print on blue canvas, we will show that exact combination on the hero images in the PDF.”

Read more
Highlights on ImageCon 2021 and a Preview of ImageCon 2022

New year, same trend! Visual media will continue to play a monumental role in driving online conversions. To keep up with visual-experience trends and best practices, Cloudinary holds an annual conference called ImageCon, a one-of-a-kind event that helps attendees create the most engaging visual experiences possible.

Read more