Cloudinary Moderation

Cloudinary Moderation uses AI tailored to your visual guidelines to validate assets for brand consistency, quality, and compliance. It functions like a dedicated brand reviewer, ensuring every asset meets your standards before it goes live. By automating what used to be a time-consuming manual task, it creates a scalable, reliable guardrail for teams handling high-volume content across marketing, marketplaces, and UGC flows.

Key use cases

1. Scaling vendor or partner submissions

Marketplaces and platforms that receive images from vendors, partners, or external contributors often need to validate large volumes of assets. Manual review does not scale and leads to inconsistent quality.

Cloudinary Moderation automatically validates images as they enter your pipeline.

Common checks include:

• Background requirements (for example white backgrounds)
• Product placement and coverage
• Image quality and resolution
• Centered or properly framed subjects
• Consistent lighting and composition
• Detection of duplicates
• Detection of overlays, watermarks, or promotional badges
• Detection of AI-generated or web-sourced images
• Blocking screenshots

Automated moderation ensures consistent visual standards across listings while reducing operational overhead.

2. Launching user-generated content (UGC)

When enabling user uploads, organizations cannot predict what type of content users may submit. Without moderation, inappropriate or unsafe content may appear publicly.

Cloudinary Moderation reviews user-submitted images before they are published.

The system can:

• Detect unsafe or inappropriate content
• Filter low-quality or unusable images
• Identify AI-generated content that violates policy
• Detect images downloaded from the web without authorization

High-quality content can also be automatically approved, enabling teams to safely activate UGC across marketing channels.

3. Enforcing brand guidelines

Organizations often define visual guidelines that must be followed across campaigns and assets. When content is created by multiple teams or agencies, enforcing these rules manually becomes difficult.

Cloudinary Moderation can automatically validate visual requirements such as:

• Logo placement
• Minimum spacing around brand elements
• Composition and framing
• Consistent tone or visual style
• Background or layout requirements

This helps maintain consistent brand presentation across large volumes of assets.

4. Compliance and risk prevention

Images can expose organizations to legal or reputational risk if they are used without proper authorization or violate internal policies.

Cloudinary Moderation helps identify potential compliance risks before assets are published.

Examples include:

• Images that appear to be illegally downloaded
• Unlicensed images
• Unauthorized third-party logos or marks
• AI-generated content that violates policy
• Sensitive or unsafe visual elements

Moderation can also be used to audit existing assets and identify potential risks across your media library.

About Cloudinary Moderation

Every image shapes how customers see your brand. Cloudinary Moderation is an AI-powered review layer that automatically checks your visuals against your brand guidelines, flagging anything that looks off so your team can approve what goes live. AI does the first pass; humans always make the final call.

How it works

  Combines AI and machine learning analysis with custom brand rules

  Identifies low-quality or off-brand images

  Flags or automatically rejects assets based on thresholds you define

  Gives you clear, explainable results and manual override controls

  Learns from feedback to improve moderation accuracy over time

Example checks

Cloudinary Moderation supports built-in checks and flexible custom rules so you can match your needs to support different use cases.

	Quality & composition Blurry or low-res images, incorrect framing or centering, bad crops, off-angle shots, duplicates or near-duplicates.
	Tone & style Incorrect lighting or exposure, harsh filters, off-brand visual treatment.
	Brand consistency Unauthorized logos, overlays or promotional badges, watermarks, incorrect backgrounds, missing logo spacing.
	Legal & safety Unlicensed or web-sourced imagery, AI-generated content, sensitive or unsafe visuals, identifiable people where not allowed.

Get started

1. Access Moderation
   Sign up or log into the Cloudinary Console. From the navigation panel, open Moderation.
2. Set up your rules
   Start quickly with pre-defined rules that cover common quality, brand, and compliance checks. Add custom rules to reflect your specific brand guidelines as needed.
3. Run moderation
   Two types of moderation are supported:
   
   One-time moderation
   Select existing assets from your Media Library, choose the applicable rules, and run moderation as a single evaluation on the selected content. This mode is intended for backfill scenarios or for testing rule configurations.
   
   Ongoing moderation
   Define moderation rules once and apply them automatically on upload. New assets are evaluated immediately when they are uploaded. Moderation can also be run on existing assets to evaluate them against the same rules.
   
   In both modes, assets are evaluated against the selected rules and surfaced for action based on the moderation outcome.
4. Review results and take action
   Focus on assets marked for review, where human validation is needed. See which rules were triggered, inspect confidence levels, and override decisions when necessary. All actions are recorded to provide a full audit trail.
5. Use moderation outcomes downstream
   Moderation results can be stored as asset metadata and accessed through the Cloudinary API or Console. Use this metadata to trigger workflows such as notifications, routing, or automated fixes using transformations.

Free plan availability

Cloudinary Moderation includes a free plan that allows you to evaluate moderation capabilities before moving to a larger deployment.

The free plan includes 500 moderation actions.

A moderation action is calculated as:

Number of assets moderated × Number of moderation rules applied

For example, if you moderate 100 images and apply 3 rules to each image, this counts as 300 moderation actions.

The free plan allows you to test moderation outcomes and evaluate how different rules perform on your assets.

Advanced moderation capabilities

Some capabilities are available only on advanced plans, including: automatic moderation on upload, AI-generated detection, and web-sourced image detection.

If you would like to explore these capabilities or evaluate how moderation can work best for you, you can contact us for a demo or discuss advanced plans with our team.

For full setup instructions and best practices, see the full Cloudinary Moderation documentation.