Use Media Library for basic asset management

Adobe Experience Manager platform provides different capabilities to manage assets. Media Library allows the users to upload a small number of assets to the repository, search and use those in the webpages, and accomplish simple asset management tasks on the assets.

Media Library is a lightweight Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that comes complimentary with Adobe Experience Manager Sites license. Sites is a Web Content Management (WCM) offering. Media Library works with all capabilities of Experience Manager.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets license is available separately for purchase. Experience Manager Assets allows for robust handling of assets via enterprise use cases, customizations for metadata, schemas, search, and user interface, and many other features beyond what Media Library provides.

Licensing requirements

Customers who have Sites license are entitled to use Media Library. It works with all components of Experience Manager.

Media Library gets installed as part of Sites. No additional license or package is required beyond Sites license and installation.

Assets versus Media Library

Experience Manager Assets provides enterprise-grade DAM functionality. Assets functionality is delivered with Experience Manager in one single package. However, users who have not purchased an Assets license are not entitled to use the advanced DAM features. Without Assets license, only Media Library features are available.

If you want to prevent unintended use of Assets features that you have not licensed, then remove all the Assets-specific workflows, components, taxonomies, options and the Assets admin from Experience Manager. Doing so prevents your users from accidentally using Assets features that you did not license.

Use Media Library

Media Library broadly covers the following use cases:

• Provide basic DAM features for web pages created using Adobe Experience Manager Sites.
• Adaptive forms and communications created using Adobe Experience Manager Forms.
• Digital screen experiences created using Adobe Experience Manager Screens.
• Assets HTTP REST APIs for headless operations.

To use the Media Library functionality, you can use the default Experience Manager user interface. Media Library is part of the Experience Manager Sites installation and no separate interface or add-on is required. Using the existing interface, Media Library users are entitled to accomplish the following tasks:

• Create folders to organize assets.
• Upload assets.
• Publish assets.
• Edit, move, and copy assets.
• Browse, filter, and search (includes similarity search) assets.
• Add values to and edit the values in the metadata fields, except Smart Tags field, that are available in the Basic tab of an asset’s Properties page by default.
• Add and delete static renditions.
• Download folders, assets, and asset renditions.
• Create asset versions.
• Create and perform review tasks on assets.
• Annotate assets.
• Add assets to Sites pages through Content Finder.
• Use Content Fragments.
• Use HTTP REST and GraphQL APIs for Content Fragments and referenced media assets, under Sites license.
• Marketing Cloud integration.
• Customize and extend asset management user interface.
• Access the Query Builder (API) to extend the search functionality.
• Create static tags.
• Author projects and tasks.
• Activity stream (timeline).
• Comments and annotations.

Note that you cannot use smart tags, Asset link, Asset selector, bulk tagging, modify asset workflows, or standard Adobe Experience Manager user interface to access Media Library without Assets license.