Canva will not publish a contributor file without metadata, and its metadata requirements are narrower than most stock agencies': a unique title, at least five keywords, and a file name that matches your CSV row exactly. Description and artist are optional but preferred. The searchable labels buyers actually filter on, Canva applies itself after review.
That last part is the piece contributors usually miss. On Adobe Stock or Shutterstock your keywords are the search index. On Canva your keywords are an input that Canva's own taxonomy then sits on top of. It changes what is worth your time at submission, and it changes what a thin keyword set actually costs you.
The fields Canva requires, and the ones it only prefers
Canva's position on the floor is blunt: it will only accept content that arrives with metadata. Within that, the help centre splits the fields into required and optional, and the split is shorter than the equivalent list at any of the photo agencies.
- Title (name) is required, for templates and for elements alike, and Canva asks for a unique title rather than a descriptive one you reuse across a set.
- Keywords (tags) are required. For CSV uploads the instruction is to provide at least five, separated by a comma and a space.
- Description is optional in the CSV specification, but Canva states it prefers one.
- Artist is optional and, again, preferred.
- File name is required as the matching key between a CSV row and the uploaded asset, and the extension has to be part of it.
Notice what is absent. There is no category field for you to pick, no model release checkbox in the metadata row, no AI disclosure toggle and no editorial flag. Those live elsewhere in Canva's process or do not exist at all, which is why a metadata template built for Adobe Stock does not map cleanly onto a Canva submission.
Title: unique, title case, and in the right language
Uniqueness is the rule that catches people shooting in sets. Submit twelve variations of the same flat lay under one title and you have handed the reviewer twelve identical rows. Canva asks for a unique title per asset, which in practice means the difference between the variants has to show up in words: the angle, the props, the colour, the orientation.
Capitalisation is specified for CSV uploads, and specified precisely: principal or main words in upper case, articles, conjunctions and prepositions in lower case. Title case, in other words, not sentence case and not all caps. It is a small rule that a batch export will break for you if your tool writes titles from a filename.
Language depends on what you are submitting, and this is where the two Canva content types genuinely diverge. Templates need titles and keywords in the language the template itself uses, because a Spanish template is sold to a Spanish-speaking designer. Elements take English, or your local language only where no English translation exists.
Canva publishes no maximum title length. That is unusual, and it is the opposite of the constraint you work under elsewhere: Shutterstock caps commercial titles at 200 characters and refuses anything shorter than five words, as its keywording rules spell out. If you are writing one title to serve several agencies, the Shutterstock ceiling is the binding one, not Canva's.
Keywords: five is the floor, and there is no published ceiling
Five keywords, comma and space separated, is what the CSV specification asks for. Canva names no upper limit anywhere in its contributor documentation. Contributors read that as an open field and it is not one, for two reasons worth understanding before you decide how many terms to write.
The first is that Canva edits what you send. Its Contributor Agreement states that Canva may apply or edit the metadata attached to stock media and templates, and that it applies its own descriptive labels to make content searchable. Your keyword set is a signal into that process, not the index itself.
The second is that relevance is still enforced on the way in, even without a numeric cap. Every agency that publishes a keyword limit also publishes a relevance rule, and the relevance rule is the one that gets files sent back. Canva's absence of a ceiling removes the arithmetic, not the judgement.
For context on where Canva sits: Shutterstock takes between 7 and 50 keywords and refuses repeated words outright. Envato Elements allows a maximum of 50 tags. Adobe Stock publishes no hard cap but its contributor help offers 15 to 25 as a rule of thumb and states that keyword order matters. Against those, Canva's five-keyword floor is the most permissive entry requirement of the four and the least informative about what a good set looks like.
Metadata field requirements across four agencies
Canva, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Envato Elements compared on whether a title is required, published title limits, keyword floors and ceilings, and metadata language rules. Canva asks for a unique title and at least five keywords and publishes no ceiling; Shutterstock takes 7 to 50 keywords and caps commercial titles at 200 characters.
Description and artist: optional in form, expected in practice
Both fields are marked optional in the CSV specification, and both are marked preferred. Canva's wider submission guidance is less equivocal: it tells contributors to always embed a precise title, description and keywords with every submission, and says accurate metadata speeds up review and can improve visibility.
Read those two statements together and the practical rule is obvious. The description will not block your submission, but it is the only free-text field where you can explain what the asset is for rather than what it contains. For a template in particular, intent is what a buyer is searching on.
The file name is a join key, not a label
This is the field that breaks batches, and it breaks them silently. Canva's rule for CSV uploads is to use the exact same file name and to include the file extension. Exact means exact: a row that reads desk-flatlay-01 will not bind to a file called desk-flatlay-01.jpg, and case differences count.
Two neighbouring rules compound it. Canva tells contributors to use unique file names, or to submit inside a folder, specifically to stop new files overwriting earlier ones. And compressed archives are not accepted, so a folder has to be extracted before upload rather than zipped for convenience.
If you deliver to several agencies from one source library, the safest pattern is to settle a naming convention once and never let an export rename anything. The file name is simultaneously your Canva join key, your deduplication handle and the thing a reviewer sees first.
Check a title and keyword set against the rules
Paste a title and a keyword set to see where it breaks the rules described in this article: fewer than five keywords, repeated words, title case errors and missing file extensions. Canva requires a unique title and at least five comma separated keywords; Shutterstock refuses repeated words and titles under five words.
The technical limits sitting behind the metadata
Metadata rules and file rules fail together, because a file rejected on format never gets its keywords read. Canva's published upload requirements are worth having in front of you when you prepare a batch.
- Images in JPEG, PNG, HEIC or WebP, up to 50MB, and up to 250 million total pixels calculated as width times height. WebP is accepted as static images only.
- SVG saved with an SVG 1.1 profile, up to 3MB.
- Video in MOV, GIF, MP4, MPEG, MKV or WEBM, up to 1GB. Uploaded 4K video is downscaled to 1080p.
- Audio in M4A, MP3, OGG, WAV or WEBM, up to 250MB.
The 250 megapixel figure is generous by stock standards and the 50MB file ceiling is the one most likely to bite, particularly on large PNG exports with transparency. The 4K downscale matters for anyone planning a video set: the metadata you write describes a clip that will be served at 1080p.
Two agreement clauses that change how you fill the fields
The Canva Contributor Agreement carries two terms that are easy to skim past and that change the calculation on metadata work. The first concerns templates: the template licence runs on an exclusive basis for three years from the date of submission, during which the design cannot be offered through a competing online design platform. Stock media, by contrast, is licensed non-exclusively, and copyright in the work stays with its owner.
That asymmetry is worth planning around. A photo you submit to Canva can go everywhere else as well, so the metadata you write for it should be portable. A template is locked to Canva for three years, so its title and keywords only ever need to serve Canva's own audience and can be written in the template's language without compromise.
The second term is that submitted stock media must be your own original work, and the agreement does not permit AI-generated content. There is no disclosure field to complete because the category is closed, which is a genuine divergence from Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, both of which accept generative work under disclosure rules. If part of your library is generative, Canva is not one of its destinations.
On payment, the agreement states that a royalty is paid for each unique, de-duplicated licence issued for your stock media, with payments made monthly once the balance is above ten dollars. De-duplicated is the operative word, and it is another reason the file name convention is not administrative trivia.
Where this sits in a multi-agency workflow
Canva's field list is short, which makes it tempting to treat as an afterthought at the end of a delivery run. The opposite is true: because the field list is short, each field carries more weight, and because Canva layers its own taxonomy on top, a careless set has nothing to fall back on. The general discipline of writing metadata for stock still applies, with the field map swapped out.
Two companion references cover the parts this one does not: the reasons Canva rejects submissions and the Creator program requirements that govern whether you can submit at all.
A five-minute metadata pass before you submit
- Confirm every file name in the CSV matches the asset exactly, extension included, and that no two names collide with anything already in your Canva library.
- Read the titles as a column, not row by row. Duplicates and near-duplicates only become visible that way, and uniqueness is the rule most often broken inside a set.
- Apply title case: principal words up, articles and prepositions down. If an export wrote the titles, assume it got this wrong.
- Count keywords. Five clears the gate; a set that actually describes an asset usually needs more than that, and none of them should be terms you could not defend to a reviewer.
- Check language per content type: template language for templates, English for elements unless no English term exists.
- Verify file sizes against the 50MB image ceiling and the 3MB SVG ceiling before the upload starts, not after it fails.
If you are running that pass by hand across several agencies at once, this is the part worth automating. Rastock AI generates titles, descriptions and keywords per agency and delivers over FTP or SFTP to more than ten destinations, with per-agency rules applied rather than one metadata set copied everywhere. The feature list covers how the rule layer works, and the pricing page covers the plans. There is a 14-day free trial and it does not ask for a card.
What makes Canva worth the small amount of extra care is that its metadata surface is unusually forgiving on counts and unusually strict on identity. Get the name right, keep the title unique, write keywords you can justify, and the rest of the field list takes care of itself.
Frequently asked questions
How many keywords does Canva require?
For CSV uploads Canva's instruction is to provide at least five keywords, separated by a comma and a space. Canva publishes no maximum. That absence is not permission to pile on terms: keywords still have to describe the asset, and Canva reserves the right to edit the metadata it receives. Five is a submission floor, not a target.
Does Canva have a title character limit?
Canva does not publish one. What it does require is that the title be unique, and that CSV titles follow a capitalisation rule: principal or main words in upper case, articles, conjunctions and prepositions in lower case. Compare that with Shutterstock, which caps commercial titles at 200 characters and refuses titles shorter than five words.
What language should Canva metadata be in?
It depends on what you are submitting. Templates take titles and keywords in the language the template itself uses, because a Spanish template is sold to Spanish-speaking users. Elements take English, or your local language only where no English translation exists. Mixing the two inside one submission is the common mistake.
Is a description required for Canva submissions?
No. In Canva's CSV specification the description and artist fields are both optional, though it states it prefers them. Canva's broader submission guidance tells contributors to embed a precise title, description and keywords with every file, and says accurate metadata speeds up review and can improve visibility. Treat it as optional in form, expected in practice.
Why does my CSV row not match my uploaded file?
Almost always because the file name in the CSV omits the extension or differs in case. Canva's rule is to use the exact same file name and include the extension. Two other traps sit nearby: compressed archives are not accepted, so folders have to be extracted first, and duplicate file names can overwrite your earlier uploads.
Does Canva accept AI-generated stock media?
No. The Contributor Agreement requires that all stock media submitted be your own original work and does not permit AI-generated content. That is a real difference from Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, which accept generative work under disclosure rules. On Canva there is no AI disclosure field to fill, because the content category is closed.