# Handle uploads

🤖/upload/handle receives uploads that your users throw at you from browser or apps, or that you throw at us programmatically.

![](/_next/static/media/upload-handle.08vi4621_7~5_.png?dpl=dpl_BKGqLNQjWctpVS239h7ZAKL6edZN)

Transloadit handles file uploads by default, so specifying this Robot is optional.

It can still be a good idea to define this Robot, though. It makes your Assembly Instructions explicit, and allows you to configure exactly how uploads should be handled. For example, you can extract specific metadata from the uploaded files.

There are **3 important constraints** when using this Robot:

1. Don’t define a `use` parameter, unlike with other Robots.
2. Use it only once in a single set of Assembly Instructions.
3. Name the Step as `:original`.

## Usage example

Handle uploads and export the uploaded files to S3:

```
{
  "steps": {
    ":original": {
      "robot": "/upload/handle"
    },
    "exported": {
      "robot": "/s3/store",
      "use": ":original",
      "credentials": "YOUR_S3_CREDENTIALS"
    }
  }
}
```

## Parameters

* ### `interpolate`

`boolean | Record<string, boolean>`\
Controls whether Assembly Variables are interpolated for individual instruction fields.\
By default, most Robot instruction fields interpolate Assembly Variables. Set this to `false` to treat every instruction field as literal text, or set an individual field path to `false` to treat only that field as literal text. For Robot-specific fields that are literal by default, set this to `true` or set that field path to `true` to opt back into interpolation.\
Use field names such as `path`, or dotted paths such as `ffmpeg.vf` for nested objects.

* ### `output_meta`

`Record<string, boolean> | boolean | Array<string>`\
Allows you to specify a set of metadata that is more expensive on CPU power to calculate, and thus is disabled by default to keep your Assemblies processing fast.\
For images, you can add `"has_transparency": true` in this object to extract if the image contains transparent parts and `"dominant_colors": true` to extract an array of hexadecimal color codes from the image.\
For images, you can also add `"blurhash": true` to extract a [BlurHash](https://blurha.sh) string — a compact representation of a placeholder for the image, useful for showing a blurred preview while the full image loads.\
For videos, you can add the `"colorspace: true"` parameter to extract the colorspace of the output video.\
For audio, you can add `"mean_volume": true` to get a single value representing the mean average volume of the audio file.\
You can also set this to `false` to skip metadata extraction and speed up transcoding.

* ### `result`

`boolean` (default: `false`)\
Whether the results of this Step should be present in the Assembly Status JSON

* ### `queue`

`batch`\
Setting the queue to 'batch', manually downgrades the priority of jobs for this step to avoid consuming Priority job slots for jobs that don't need zero queue waiting times

* ### `force_accept`

`boolean` (default: `false`)\
Force a Robot to accept a file type it would have ignored.\
By default, Robots ignore files they are not familiar with.[🤖/video/encode](/docs/robots/video-encode.md), for example, will happily ignore input images.\
With the `force_accept` parameter set to `true`, you can force Robots to accept all files thrown at them. This will typically lead to errors and should only be used for debugging or combatting edge cases.

* ### `ignore_errors`

`boolean | Array<meta | execute>` (default: `[]`)\
Ignore errors during specific phases of processing.\
Setting this to `["meta"]` will cause the Robot to ignore errors during metadata extraction.\
Setting this to `["execute"]` will cause the Robot to ignore errors during the main execution phase.\
Setting this to `true` is equivalent to `["meta", "execute"]` and will ignore errors in both phases.

## Related blog posts

* [New pricing model for future Transloadit customers](/blog/2018/02/raising-prices/) February 7, 2018
* [Easily burn subtitles into videos with our new Robot](/blog/2018/12/intro-to-the-subtitle-bot/) December 6, 2018
* [Tutorial: file filtering & virus scanning with Transloadit](/blog/2019/02/file-filtering/) February 6, 2019
* [Re-Loadit: simplify uploads with /upload/handle Robot](/blog/2019/02/upload-handle/) February 13, 2019
* [How to insert watermarks to videos with Transloadit](/blog/2019/02/inserting-watermarks/) February 20, 2019
* [Exploring the /google/store Robot in Re-Loadit series](/blog/2019/03/google-store/) March 1, 2019
* [Exploring the 'output\_meta' parameter in Transloadit](/blog/2019/03/output-meta/) March 20, 2019
* [Tutorial: using /video/merge to develop video slideshows](/blog/2019/06/slideshow-tutorial/) June 14, 2019
* [No-code real-time video uploading with Bubble & Transloadit](/blog/2019/08/lets-build-a-website-with-video-encoding-with-no-code/) August 2, 2019
* [New feature: auto-transcribe videos with subtitles](/blog/2021/03/speech-transcribe/) March 8, 2021
* [Introducing the OCR Robot for easy text extraction](/blog/2021/08/intro-to-the-ocr-bot/) August 26, 2021
* [Let's Build: video from album art with Transloadit](/blog/2021/10/video-artwork/) October 10, 2021
* [Why Transloadit outperforms S3 for file uploads](/blog/2023/04/transloadit-vs-s3-for-uploads/) April 6, 2023