Digital Asset Management Overview

Last updated: Mar-17-2024

DAM introduction

Assets, Cloudinary's Digital Asset Management (DAM) product, enables 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.

Cloudinary DAM workflow


Assets is designed for large organizations and enterprises delivering content to websites or apps. Images, videos and other files, 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 media assets, ensuring optimized, rapid, and responsive delivery to customers. For more information, see Get started with Assets.

Tip
Explore the capabilities of Assets DAM with our free plan. The documentation remains applicable for the free plan, with differences and limitations highlighted where relevant.
  • 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 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.

Note
Users with certain admin roles can switch between the Programmable Media product and the Assets product using the Product Selector located at the top left of your Console.

Users with the Media Library user and Media Library admin roles can't switch products.

This section describes the options available for Assets. For details on working with Programmable Media, see the Programmable Media Service overview.

Assets Console

Assets 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.
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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, view the latest release notes for your active product, 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.

Assets navigation options

When the Assets product is selected, the following options may be available from the Product Navigation menu, depending on your user role.

While Assets administrators have access to all or most of the options, Media Library users are only able to to access the Media Library.

Option Description
Product environment selector 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.

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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.
Dashboard View summary details and trend graphs to help you analyze your overall DAM usage in terms of total assets, collection activity, and uploads.
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 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.
Transformations Provides various options for generating and managing transformations through the transformation builder and transformation templates. These templates can be applied to assets in the Media Library, instantly generating different asset variations for preview or download. For details, see Named transformations.

Note: Availability of this premium feature for Assets is plan-dependent and may only be available by first selecting the Programmable Media product.

For Assets free plans

The following differences apply to Assets free plans:

  • The Dashboard feature is limited.
  • The Activity Reports feature is unavailable.
  • The Portals feature is not at enterprise-grade level and is unavailable for Assets enterprise plans. In Assets free plans, you can generate and manage a single media portal for publishing assets in the form of user-friendly and responsive web pages. For more information, see Media portals (Beta).

For more options and information, contact support.

Media Library features

The Media Library provides you access to all your digital assets and is the main touch point into the Cloudinary's Assets product. All the features mentioned here are described in depth in the DAM user guide.

From the Media Library you can:

Media Library main view

Note
You can set your Media Library display language from the My profile page of the Console Settings. The language you set applies for all product environments you have access to.

Media Library pages

From the Media Library, you'll be able to switch between a few common pages using the Media Library Tabs:

  • Home:
    • In Assets enterprise plans: Provides quick access to featured, predefined searches and a personalized hero image selected by your administrator in the Media Library Preferences, saved searches your administrator shared with you and folders, collections, and saved searches that you starred as favorites.
    • In Assets free plans: 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)

Notes
  • 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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