Moderation results become most useful when they live on the assets themselves. Saving results as structured metadata writes each asset's outcome into your Cloudinary Media Library, where your team can see it, search by it, and build workflows around it.
What gets saved
For each asset, Moderation can save:
Moderation result - Approved, Rejected, or Needs review.
Rejection reason - the reason(s) the asset was rejected, if any.
Moderation note - the note a reviewer added when making a manual decision, if any.
These appear as regular structured metadata fields on the asset in the Media Library - no different from metadata your team adds by hand.
Why it's useful
Anyone browsing the Media Library sees an asset's moderation outcome without opening the Moderation app.
You can search and filter assets by moderation result.
Downstream workflows (routing, notifications, publishing gates) can act on the result.
Two ways to save
Manually, per run
Open a run from Moderation Runs.
Select Save Metadata to Assets.
Choose what to save: Save all, Save approved, Save rejected, or Save needs review.
Confirm. You'll see a notification while the results are written to Cloudinary.
Tips:
Saving "needs review" results too lets other teams see what's still pending - useful when publication is blocked on review.
If you review results manually, save metadata after finishing your review, so the final decisions are what lands on the assets.
Manual saving gives you a checkpoint: review first, fix what you disagree with, then save the final outcome.
Automatically, for every run
Go to Settings.
Under Structured Metadata, turn on "Automatically write moderation result to Structured Metadata."
From then on, results are saved to each asset right after it's moderated - no manual step. On run pages, the save button is replaced by a confirmation that results were saved automatically. If you later make a manual decision on an asset, the updated result is saved too.
Note: the automatic setting is captured when a run starts. Turning it on or off doesn't change runs that are already in progress.
Setup
None required. The first time results are saved, Moderation creates its default metadata fields in your Cloudinary account automatically.
If your organization prefers its own field names, you can map results to your own structured metadata fields instead - see "Moderation settings" for the custom field mapping option.
⚙️ Auto-save moderation results to structured metadata
You can also use custom structured metadata fields instead of the default fields generated by Moderation, giving you full control over how results are stored and organized.
Once enabled, metadata is written to each asset immediately after moderation and is visible directly in the DAM on the asset's metadata via API.
Where to see it
Open any moderated asset in the Cloudinary Media Library: the moderation fields appear with the asset's other structured metadata. In the Moderation app itself, each asset's Metadata tab (in the run sidebar) shows the same values.
