Organize your digital assets organize-digital-assets
All digital assets, metadata, and content of Microsoft® Office and PDF documents are extracted and made searchable. Search allows sophisticated filtering on assets and completely respects the proper permissions. Metadata is covered in detail in Metadata in Digital Asset Management.
Experience Manager Assets supports multiple ways of organizing content. You can organize them in a hierarchical manner using folders or you can organize them in an unordered, ad-hoc manner, for example, tags. Users can edit tags in the DAM Asset Editor where subassets, renditions, and metadata are displayed.
Organize assets in folders organize-using-folders
The most basic way to organize assets is to save the assets in folders. It is analogous to organizing files in folders in your local filesystem. For more information about how to create and manage folders, see Manage assets. How you name files and folders, how you arrange subfolders, and how you handle the files within these folders can have a significant impact on how those assets are processed. By using consistent and appropriate file and folder naming strategies, along with good metadata practice, you can make the most of your digital assets repository.
-
Usually, your digital assets repository is always growing. Therefore, it is important to formalize metadata use, folder structure, and file naming early in the content creation cycle.
-
Use folders only to impose a consistent storage structure for your digital assets. This consistency helps your process and manages your assets better. For example, assets placed in the following types of folders can help you segregate your assets:
- Development folders: contains digital assets that you are currently working on.
- Client folders: contains digital assets based on clients or project names.
- Primary folders: contains original, source digital assets.
- Rendition folders: contains renditions and copies of the original, source digital assets.
- File Size folders: contains digital assets based on small, medium, or large file sizes.
- Staging folders: contains digital assets that are ready to publish live on your website.
- MIME type folders: contains digital assets that are specific to MIME types such as images, documents, and multimedia.
- Archive folders: contains retired digital assets.
- Date-based folders: contains digital assets based on a creation date or a last modified date.
-
Create a directory of folders that are not likely to change so that any customization or automation continues to work. For example, the assigned processing profiles continue to work.
-
If an asset is already published, then you use Experience Manager to move the asset to another folder, and republish from its new location. The original published asset location is still available along with the newly republished asset. The original published asset, however, is lost to Experience Manager and cannot be unpublished. Therefore, as a best practice, first unpublish an asset and then move it to a different folder.
Organize assets using tags use-tags-to-organize-assets
Adding tags to assets makes them easier to retrieve during a search, create collections using the search results, boost search ranking for some assets, and apply AI algorithms of Adobe Sensei for asset discovery.
Adobe Experience Manager Assets uses a self-learning algorithm to create highly descriptive tags that allow you to find the right asset in just a few clicks. Smart tagging uses Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, which can be trained to recognize and apply both standard and business-specific tags to imagery. Smart Tags can also identify content, individual words, or phrases and automatically apply descriptive tags to assets.
Following are the steps to add tags to an asset:
-
Log in to Experience Manager Assets.
-
Click Assets > Files, select the asset and click Properties to open the asset properties.
-
In the Basic tab, click the folder icon in Tags metadata. A pop-up window opens.
-
Search or select the appropriate tags from the existing tags in
cq-tags. You can assign multiple tags to the asset.You can sort the tags structure in ascending or descending order based on the Name (alphabetical order), Created date, or Modified date. In the following Illustration, the tag structure is sorted alphabetically based on the Name.
-
Click Save to update the asset metadata changes.
For more information, see the following articles:
Organize as collections organize-as-collections
With asset collections in Experience Manager Assets, you can streamline the ability to create, edit, and share assets between users. Create several types of collections based on the way you use them, including collections that contain a static reference list of assets, folders, and collections, and collections that pull in assets based on search criteria. You can create collections with assets from different locations and share them with multiple users with different levels of access, viewing and editing privileges.
For more information, see manage collections
Use profiles to organize your assets organize-to-use-profiles
A processing profile contains Assets processing commands that apply to assets that get uploaded to pre-defined folders. Profiles are used to automate the processing of contents of a folder or freshly uploaded assets. You can use profiles to organize your assets better.
Standardizing metadata usage, file naming, and folder structure ensures that as your pool of digital assets grows, you can apply processing profiles to folders with greater precision and consistency.
See also