Contextual metadata
Last updated: Sep-02-2024
Contextual metadata is a custom key-value pair that you can assign to individual assets either programmatically or in the Cloudinary Console. Once defined, contextual metadata can be referenced in your application, for example to find assets that meet relevant criteria and for generating transformations based on the value of a particular contextual metadata key, using user-defined variables and/or conditional transformations.
Adding context while uploading
You can assign context to assets while uploading them by specifying the context
parameter in the upload method.
For example, uploading the image boots.jpg
and adding the context key caption
set to a value of New
to the image:
The context method
The context
parameter of an uploaded asset contains a pipe-separated list of key-value pairs of contextual metadata (up to 255 characters). The context
method can be used to manage the contextual metadata of an uploaded asset by setting the value of the command
parameter to either add
a new key-value pair, or remove_all
contextual metadata from the asset. The Cloudinary SDKs wrap the REST API context
method and offer two separate methods: one for adding contextual metadata and one for removing all contextual metadata:
For example, adding the contextual metadata key-pairs caption=New
and product=shirt
to the images with the public IDs of shirt1
and shirt2
:
Monitoring context changes using a notification URL
You can use Cloudinary notifications to monitor for changes to the contextual metadata on your media assets, including contextual metadata that has been added or removed via API or the Cloudinary Console UI.
To capture these changes, add a Notification URL triggered by the 'Resource context changed' Notification Type in the Webhook Notifications page of your Console Settings. The notification sent will specify resource_context_changed
as the notification_type
, and include information about which resource was changed, the source of the change (UI or API), and whether contextual metadata was added, removed, or updated. For example:
See the documentation on Notifications for more information.