How to Use Collections to Organize Your Assets

This tutorial shows how to use Cloudinary's Collections feature to organize your assets. We recommend reviewing our official documentation to review all its capabilities.

Tutorial Sections:

• Watch a Video
• What are Collections?
• How to Create New Collections
• Adding Assets to Existing Collections
• Accessing Your Collections
• Removing Assets from Collections
• Additional Notes

Watch a Video

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What are Collections?

Cloudinary's Collections feature helps you to organize and share your assets. You can group together assets from various folders into a single collection. Adding an asset to a collection doesn't affect its folder location. You can even add the same asset to multiple collections.

For example, suppose you're designing a new header image for your website’s homepage. You can select images and videos that might be candidates for the header’s background and add them to a new collection.

*Sharing capabilities are only available on paid Cloudinary plans that provide multiple user seats. These include Advanced and larger plans. More details about sharing collections can be found in our tutorials.

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How to Create New Collections

You can create your collection first, and then add assets to it. To do this, go to the Cloudinary Management Console's Media Library section.

Then select some images and videos for this project, and add them to the collection. The maximum assets that can be added to the collection is 1000. 

You can create new collections on the fly by typing the name of a collection that doesn't yet exist and clicking Create new collection. You can name the new collection anything you want.

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Adding Assets to Existing Collections

You can always add new assets to your collections. Simply select the assets you want to add and choose the Add to collection option. Start typing the name of the collection you want to add the assets to. When you see it, select it and the assets will be added to it.

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Accessing Your Collections

You can find all of your collections from the Media Library menu.

This will make accessing those assets simple and efficient. You can keep the collection for as long as you need it. Once you wrap up the project, you can delete the collection without affecting the original assets or your folder structure.

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Removing Assets from Collections

If you want to remove an asset from a collection, go into the relevant collection. Then, simply select the asset’s checkmark and select Remove from the toolbar. This will remove the asset from that specific collection. It will still remain in any other collections it may have been added to, as well as its folder.

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Additional Notes

Our team has plenty of other resources for you to learn how to take advantage of Cloudinary's organization and collaborative capabilities with Collections! This includes a tutorial and complete documentation on how to share your collections with both internal and external users, if you have a paid Cloudinary account.

Collection can hold up to maximum of 1000 assets. 

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Credits:

• Content authoring and production from Jenny Spoelma
• Video samples from Fauxels
• Icons from Prettycons
• Background music from Freedom Trail Studios