Approval workflow for Cloudinary Collections
Overview
Whilst investigating how we might structure our Cloudinary DAM, we looked into Collections as an alternative to using folders (see the full documentation under 'Spikes'). Collections are a dynamic way to create conceptual groupings of assets, regardless of their folder structure. Although Collections didn't suit our use case for organising assets generally, we could see a use for them as part of the Brand approvals process which we have documented here.
The problem
Currently a wide selection of assets are sent to the brand team that are considered approved for use in content by the Creative team, however once a piece of content has been built by the Brand team there is a re-approval of the use of the assets and requests are made for assets to be swapped out. At this point of content creation it takes much longer for the Brand team to update the assets, making the process quite inefficient.
The solution
Using Collections, the Brand team could group the assets they would like to use for a particular piece of content and share that Collection with the Creative team for approval ahead of creating content pieces. Each asset within the collection would have an initial approval status of awaiting_approval (this is automatically set on upload), and the Creative team can change that status to approved or unapproved. The status can be updated for a single asset at a time, or in bulk for the whole collection. Once a collection has been approved, the Brand team can focus on creating content without having to go through a further approval process.
Note: Collections are just a visual grouping of assets in the Cloudinary Media Library. Currently they are not detailed in notifications, or any of Cloudinary's APIs.