Amazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects

Amazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects by Daniel Abib on 16 JUN 2026 in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) , AWS Summit New York , Events , Launch , News , Storage Permalink Comments Share Today, we’re announcing a new metadata capability for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) called annotations, enabling you to attach rich, large-scale business context directly to your objects. You can store up to 1,000 named annotations per object, each up to 1 MB in size, totaling up to 1 GB per object, in flexible formats like JSON, XML, YAML, or plain text. You can modify or delete an annotation at any time, without re-writing your objects, making it easy to keep your object context current. Organizations are building AI agents and autonomous workflows that need to find, understand, and act on data without human intervention. To support these agentic workflows, you need metadata that can evolve alongside the data, scale to petabytes of objects, and remain queryable without expensive retrieval. With S3 annotations, you can store context such as AI-generated transcripts, content ratings, or technical specifications directly alongside your objects. Your context moves automatically with the object during copy, replication, and cross-region transfers, and S3 removes it when you delete the object. When you enable S3 Metadata , annotations automatically flow into fully managed annotation tables that you can query with Amazon Athena and other analytics engines. Common use cases Annotations solve complex metadata challenges across industries: Media & Entertainment : Track transcripts, content moderation results, subtitle files, and licensing metadata as separate annotations on video assets, eliminating the need to synchronize metadata across multiple media asset management systems. Financial Services : Attach AI-generated investment summaries and sentiment analysis to research documents, enabling autonomous research agents to discover r