How to Share Collections and Collaborate with Users

This tutorial walks through how you can use Cloudinary's Collections feature to share assets and collaborate with both internal and external users. We recommend reviewing our official documentation if you want to review all the capabilities of Collections.

Tutorial Sections:

• Watch a Video
• How Collections Aid Collaboration
• How to Share a Collection
• Sharing Collections Internally
• Sharing Collections Externally
• Additional Notes

Watch a Video

Go back to the top of the tutorial.

How Collections Aid Collaboration

Cloudinary’s digital asset management solution (DAM) is designed to help teams collaborate efficiently during the creative process. Collections offer an easy way to share assets and streamline workflows across internal and external stakeholders.

When creating materials for a new campaign or product launch, there are several touchpoints between marketers, content managers, and designers that take place. These may include coordinating with a global marketing team, photographers, a creative agency and more to get an idea from conception to finished product.

Instead of transferring files back and forth and managing various versions, collections provide a central hub for collaboration where everyone involved can view, manage and even add additional assets to the project.

Go back to the top of the tutorial.

How to Share a Collection

As shown in other tutorials, collections are easy to make. And if you are on our Advanced plan or higher, you can share it with either internal users of your Cloudinary account or external users. The external users you share the collection with don’t even need a Cloudinary account!

Sharing Collections Internally

Let’s start with how to share collections internally.

If you have an account with multiple internal users, you can choose to share with a set group of users or a specific user.

Each group or individual can have different access permissions to the collections' assets too. They will be able to access it from the collections page in their Cloudinary account.

Sharing Collections Externally

Now, let me show you how to share your collections externally. This comes into play if you want to share the collection with an external agency, partner or the press, for example.

In the collections' Share section, you can also create a URL that can be shared with anyone, even those who don't have login access to your Cloudinary account.

Depending on your account settings, you may even be able to share it to them in a more interactive and visual way too, thanks to our *Visual Collection Sharing functionality! Here is an example of this feature.

Any changes you make to the files in your collection, will be accessible through the link. This includes things like adding new versions of assets, changing the collection name or adding or removing files from the collection. For example, let’s say you shared the link with an agency that only had six assets in it. A week later, you add seven more assets. If the agency opens the link the second week, they will download all 13 assets.

The URL options button opens up settings that allow you to determine when, or if, the external sharing link is viable.

You can set both a start and expiration date to the link. You can set these dates at any time and they will take effect, even if the link has already been shared.

Likewise, you can completely delete the link if you no longer want people to access your assets in that collection. It's that simple.

*Please contact our Support team if you are interested in adding the Visual Collections Sharing feature to your account.

Go back to the top of the tutorial.

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 complete documentation on how to create collections and organize your assets within them.

Lastly, we want to hear from you! If you find a way to use collections to aid your collaboration efforts, share your examples. We always enjoy seeing what our community develops, and we would love to share your successes too. And of course, we’re here to provide support if you need assistance.

Go back to the top of the tutorial.

Credits

• Content authoring and production from Jenny Spoelma
• Background music from Diamond Ortiz
• Icons from Prettycons
• Videos from Pressmaster, Fauxels and Distill