Asset Automation

Managing assets manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. With Cortado, you can automate asset-related tasks like renaming, resizing, tagging, or optimizing files as soon as they’re uploaded. This guide shows how to set up backend flows that react to uploads, apply transformations, store metadata, and keep your asset library clean and searchable. Asset automation is perfect for content-heavy apps, marketing tools, or any product that handles user-generated media.

Intermediate

17 min

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Step 1: Define Your Automation Goals

Before you start coding, clearly outline what you want Cortado to do when an asset is uploaded. Examples include:

Rename the file to a consistent format (e.g. userID_timestamp.png)
Resize or compress images to improve performance
Generate thumbnails or previews
Add tags based on file type or origin
Store metadata like size, dimensions, or MIME type

Defining these goals helps structure your workflow and plan which routes or background jobs to use.

Step 2: Connect Uploads to Automation

Once a file is uploaded, you can trigger automation in a few ways:

Use POST-upload hooks: Create a route like /assets/processed that handles uploads
Define a processing pipeline: Step-by-step actions like resize → tag → move
Apply logic by file type: PDFs, images, and audio may follow different flows
Save metadata: Store file properties in your database or send to a 3rd-party
Chain with external tools: Use external APIs (e.g. image compression) as part of the workflow

This step builds the bridge between a basic upload and a smart, reactive backend system.

Step 3: Common Automation Patterns

These patterns are reusable across many projects. You can start with one automation and scale it up later by combining routes or chaining tasks. Cortado makes this modular and composable.

Automating Workflow After Uploads

Once an asset is uploaded, you can use Cortado to automatically take further actions based on file type or metadata. For instance, image uploads can trigger resizing and optimization. PDFs may be scanned for embedded text or previews generated. Tags can be applied for categorization, and metadata like dimensions or file size can be stored in your database. These post-processing steps should be modular, reusable, and designed to run asynchronously if needed. The goal is to make every upload smart — handled once by the user, and then enriched automatically by your backend.

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