On Roblox, content is a special formatted string that refers to an asset, such as an image, sound, or mesh. For safety reasons, the ContentProvider service prevents links to files not on trusted sites from loading. The following diagram shows how the filter works:

Content Formats

Content can be formatted in several ways. All formats point to either an online file or a file saved to the client’s computer. The basic structure is a protocol name, followed by ://, then a string which depends on the protocol used.

Protocols

rbxasset

This points to Roblox’s content folder on the user’s computer.

Here are the content folder locations for supported operating systems:

Windows — %localappdata%\Roblox\Versions\<version>\content
Mac — Applications/RobloxStudio.app/Contents/Resources/content

rbxassetid

This points to a user-created asset on the site. For example, the following rbxassetid points to an image created by Roblox:

And this is its URL equivalent:

rbxgameasset

This points to an asset uploaded through the Game Explorer. It allows access to assets by a user-friendly name instead of ID, so if you upload an image named Potion.png via the Game Explorer, you can reference it as:

In the above example, “Images” is the category/folder that appears in the Game Explorer, and “Potion” is the asset name, minus its extension.

rbxhttp

This is basically shorthand for ContentProvider/BaseUrl. For example:

Will expand to:

rbxthumb

This is a content format that allows for easy loading of thumbnails. It works everywhere you’d expect an image content ID to work, for instance ImageLabel/Image or ContentProvider/PreloadAsync|ContentProvider:PreloadAsync().

The format for rbxthumb is as follows and the order of parameters is enforced.

For example:

http / https

This points to the exact location of something on the internet. It only works on Roblox-approved sites and will raise an error if used otherwise.