An index is a basic unit for organizing and storing your video data (video embeddings and metadata). Indexes facilitate information retrieval and processing.

You can use indexes to group related videos. For example, if you want to upload multiple videos from a car race, Twelve Labs recommends you create a single index and upload all the videos to it. Then, to find a specific moment in that race, you call the /search endpoint once, passing it the unique identifier of the index.

When creating a new index, you must specify at least the following information:

• Name: Use a brief and descriptive name to facilitate future reference and management. Index names must be unique and cannot be duplicated.
• Engine configuration: Provide the video understanding engine that you want to enable for your index and one or more indexing options.

Note the following about engine configurations:

• The engine and the indexing options specified when you create an index apply to all the videos you upload to that index and cannot be changed.
• To activate the thumbnail generation feature, include an array named addons in your request that contains the thumbnail value. See the Retrieve thumbnails page for details.

For a description of each field in the request and response, see the API Reference > Create an index page.

Prerequisites

• You’re familiar with the concepts that are described on the Platform overview page.
• You have a valid Twelve Labs account. For details about creating an account and retrieving your API key, see the Authentication page.

Procedure

Follow the steps in the guide below to create an index.