# Useful but Little-Known Features of ADK 2.0
๐ Struggling to manage binary data like images, PDFs, and audio files that your AI agents produce and consume?
ADK 2.0's artifact management provides a unified system for handling binary data, identified by filename with automatic versioning built in.
๐ Title: Artifact Management
๐ URL:
๐งฉ Overview
Artifacts provide a unified way to manage binary data generated and stored within agent sessions. Each artifact is represented as a `google.genai.types.Part` with inline_data (data bytes + MIME type) and identified by filename. Every save automatically assigns a version number (0, 1, 2...), enabling change tracking. Scope can be session-level (default) or user-level (with the `user:` prefix).
๐ How to use it
Use the `context` object to save, load, and list artifacts.
```python
from google.genai import types
# Save an artifact
image_part = types.Part(inline_data=types.Blob(
data=image_bytes,
mime_type="image/png"
))
version = "report_chart.png", image_part)
# Load an artifact
artifact = context.load_artifact("report_chart.png")
# List all artifacts
artifact_names = context.list_artifacts()
```
Use `InMemoryArtifactService` for development and `GcsArtifactService` for production, enabling flexible deployment across environments.
๐ Building it into production
ใปUse `GcsArtifactService` in production for durable, persistent storage
ใปLeverage user-scoped artifacts (with `user:` prefix) for data shared across sessions
ใปTake advantage of versioning to build change history tracking and rollback mechanisms
ใปSet MIME types correctly to ensure downstream processing compatibility
๐ก Use cases
๐ผ๏ธ Saving and reusing agent-generated charts and diagrams
๐ PDF report generation with version control
๐ต Storing synthesized audio and passing it to downstream processing
๐ค Managing per-user profile images and documents
โ ๏ธ Watch out
`InMemoryArtifactService` loses all data when the process terminates โ use it only for development and testing. For large volumes of binary data, watch GCS storage costs and quotas. Session-scoped artifacts become inaccessible after the session ends, so use user-scoped artifacts for data that needs to persist.
โจ With artifact management, handling binary data becomes straightforward, making it dramatically easier to build multimodal agent capabilities.
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