Settings and preferences

There are several ways in which you can determine the behavior of your DAM. Some of the settings described determine behavior across your entire account, and some of the settings are specific to each product environment:

• From the Media Library, you can determine options per product environment:

  • Set your Media Library preferences for the behavior and/or appearance of the Media Library.
  • Extend the core functionality of your DAM by adding apps from the App Marketplace.

• From the Cloudinary Console Settings pages, you can:

  • Determine options for the entire account, including My profile for editing your personal information and setting your Media Library display language; Account settings for upgrading your plan, updating your account details, and adding or editing the product environments to your account; and User settings for creating and managing users in your account.
  • Determine options per product environment, including Upload settings that influence how media is uploaded, stored, and delivered in your product environment; Security settings that affect how assets are shared, accessed and delivered in your product environment; and Access Keys settings that enable developers on your team manage the API key pairs that allow programmatic access to your product environment.

Media Library preferences

Media Library preferences enable you to control the behavior and/or appearance of the Media Library for a product environment, such as determining the way custom metadata is displayed and maintained or what is included in the results when you run an Advanced Search.

To access the Media Library preferences, click Preferences from the Product Navigation menu:

After you modify and save modifications to the Media Library preferences, logged in users may need to refresh their browsers to apply the changes.

The defaults in the Media Library Preferences provide a good starting place for your Digital Asset Management activities. However, each organization should review all the available options in the Media Library Preferences pane to determine the options that best answer its needs.

Dynamic and fixed folder modes

You can use either dynamic or fixed folder mode in your product environment. These modes determine how assets are named, and whether changing the asset name and folder location in the Media Library impacts delivery URLs, which could break links to assets in production.

Consider these options, especially if your assets are delivered on a website or app:

• Dynamic folder mode: Enables Cloudinary users to move assets between asset folders, and rename and move those folders without affecting the asset's public ID identifier and delivery URL path.

  Assets have a user-friendly display name as an additional identifier. Both display names and asset folder names can be freely modified without affecting the public ID and delivery URL.

• Fixed folders mode: The folder and asset name shown in the Media Library together are a direct reflection of the asset's public ID full path, and thus control the delivery URL path and file name. In fixed folder mode, moving the asset to a different folder or editing the asset 'name' also modifies the asset's URL, and if not done carefully, risks breaking production content. Folder renaming isn't supported in this mode.

This page describes the expected behavior for both fixed and dynamic folder modes, wherever they may differ.

If dynamic folders is enabled for your product environment, you'll see the following indication at the top of your Media Library Preferences:

Localization

In the Media Library Preferences, you can customize the user interface for your product environment by setting the default display language. The selected language becomes the default language for the Media Library, Manage Structured Metadata page (admins only), as well as for publicly shared collections and media portals.

Individual users in the DAM as well as viewers of publicly shared collections and media portals can switch languages in the relevant interface.

For users within the DAM, the language they select is a global setting that applies to all product environments they have access to.

Advanced Search filter options

You can select and order up to 10 filters that will be permanently displayed in the Advanced Search. The filters that you don't select are still accessible and can be added by the user while performing a search.

Download options for external sharing

From the Media Library preferences, you can select whether or not the option to download original images and videos will be displayed in published collections and media portals, which are shared with stakeholders outside your organization.

• If you select Remove option to download original images and videos:

  • The option to download original images and videos won't be offered.
  • This admin setting can't be overwritten when publishing an individual collection or creating a media portal.

• If you deselect Remove option to download original images and videos:

  • The option to download originals will be offered.
  • The option to download original images and videos can still be removed when publishing a specific collection or creating a media portal.

• Whether you select or deselect Remove option to download original images and videos:

  • Original images and videos can be previewed.
  • The option to download original raw assets is offered.

Early access

Check the Early access option for features that you can enable for your team early, before they become available automatically.

Currently, you can enable early access to the new Advanced Editor (Transformation Builder) with an improved, simple and easy to use interface.

Cloudinary Console Settings

In addition to defining Media Library preferences, you can configure additional settings that influence your account as a whole, as well as how your media is uploaded, stored, and delivered within the currently selected product environment. Some Settings affect both DAM users and developers, so you should coordinate with your developers where relevant.

Click the Settings icon in the Console Options sidebar to view your Console Settings.

The default Console Settings provide a good starting place for your Digital Asset Management activities. However, each organization should review all the available options on all the Settings pages and determine the settings that best answer your organization's needs.

The following sections highlight a few of the common settings that you may want to consider when setting up your account and product environment.

Account settings

The settings in this section affect your entire account. You can use this section to update your personal account details, upgrade your plan, define/edit users in the account or add/edit the product environments in your account.

Managing additional product environment subscriptions

You can see the maximum number of product environments that you're eligible for via your base plan in the panel on the right side of your Account Settings page of the Cloudinary Console. If you need to increase your product environment limit, you can upgrade your plan by clicking the Change Plan button.

Alternatively, you can separately purchase additional product environment subscriptions over and above your plan's limit by clicking on the Change product environment limit link from the Product Environments section on the Account Settings page of the Cloudinary Console. You can extend your limit by up to 5 additional product environment subscriptions, with no need to switch plans.

Afterwards, you can increase or decrease the number of additional product environment subscriptions on your account anytime.

For additional help, or to add more than 5 additional product environments, contact support.

Upload settings

The Upload page includes options that impact the default behavior applied to media when you upload assets to your product environment. Those you may want to pay special attention to include:

• Automatic backup: Determines whether every uploaded file is securely backed up, including support for multiple revisions. When enabled, the backups increase your account's storage usage (unless you set a private S3 or Google Cloud bucket for your backups).

• Media Library upload presets: Upload Presets are a predefined set of upload preferences. To control the way all assets are uploaded via the Media Library, you can assign specific signed upload presets to act as the defaults for image, video, and raw uploads within the Media Library. For more information, see Managing upload presets in the DAM.

Security settings

The Security page includes options that restrict how assets are shared, accessed and delivered. The settings impact only the selected product environment.

Since the options in the Security page affect the API and asset delivery, coordinate with one of your developers to configure these settings.

The following configurations also impact how assets are handled in DAM:

PDF and ZIP file sharing and delivery

However, the Allow delivery of PDF and ZIP files setting, in addition to determining whether PDF and ZIP files can be programmatically delivered, also affects asset and collection sharing in the Media Library. This setting must be turned on in order to publish collections and to publish single assets that are PDF and ZIP files (including .zip, .rar, .tgz, .gz, .bz2, .bzip, .7z, and .pdf).

Data privacy

Cloudinary takes the responsibility of protecting your data seriously, and complies with widely accepted security standards and regulations, enterprise class security features, our privacy policies, and our commitment to transparency. See our Trust page for more information.

When necessary, a Cloudinary employee with specific authorization may need to enter a product environment for the purposes of providing technical support. Cloudinary customers on an Enterprise plan can request an additional layer of privacy that’s enabled per product environment. This additional layer of privacy hides all data in the enabled product environments from all Cloudinary employees, even those with the permission levels necessary to provide that kind of support.

When the additional layer of privacy is enabled, Cloudinary employees can't:

• Access the product environment's full API secret, which prevents accessing data programmatically.
• Access delivery URLs via the Media Library.
• View asset thumbnails or previews in any Media Library view.
• Perform an asset search of any kind.
• Use the Bulk Delete option in the Security page of the Console Settings.
• See actual public IDs and folder and collection names.

At some point, you may need Cloudinary to access your actual data while providing technical support. In that case, Admins and Master admins can allow temporary access to the product environment. From the Security page of the Console Settings, check Allow temporary access and set the time limit for access.

Admins and Master admins can change access settings at any time, including canceling access and changing its time limit.

All administrators will receive an email notifying them of any change in access status, including when access has been allowed, canceled, time limit changed and expired.

Apps for DAM

You can customize and enhance the Media Library core product by selecting apps to add to your product environment. Enable the apps that are relevant to your DAM users from the set of apps that have been made available.

To access the Media Library apps, select App Marketplace from the Product Navigation menu.

Read the description on the cover of each app and click Learn more... for more information about what each app has to offer, including a quick demo. Then, enable the ones that are useful to you and your team. Once you've enabled your apps, you can access them from relevant menus in the Media Library.