AEM Assets is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that is a part of the Experience Manager platform and enables your enterprise to manage and distribute digital assets. Users across an organization can manage, store, and access many types of digital assets such as images, videos, documents, audio clips, 3D files, and rich media for use on the web, in print, and for digital distribution.
Assets provides enterprise-wide sharing and distribution of an organization’s key digital assets. Users across an organization can store, manage, and access digital assets such as images, graphics, audio, video, and documents through a Web interface (or a CIFS or WebDAV folder).
Assets capability of Experience Manager lets you do the following:
Assets completely integrates with Sites and works seamlessly for all use cases. For example, when authoring web pages, the Sites authors can find and use the digital assets via the Content Finder. The user interface of Assets is the same as that of Sites. See an overview of Sites for full details.
The basic user interface is the same as that of Sites. See Overview of the Sites for full details.
When determining whether to put an image into the DAM repository or use an image component, consider the image lifecycle:
An asset is a digital document, image, video, or audio (or part thereof) that can have multiple renditions. It can also have sub-assets, for example, layers in a Photoshop file, slides in a PowerPoint file, pages in a pdf, files in a ZIP.
An asset is essentially a binary plus metadata plus renditions plus sub-assets. See the DAM Performance Guide for detailed information.
Uploading and/or editing a large volume of assets (particularly images) can impact the performance of your Experience Manager deployment.
When working with digital assets in Experience Manager, it helps if you understand the following terminology:
Collection: A collection of assets, either based on physical location (folder), common properties (saved search folder), or user selection (lightbox folders).
Metadata Assets have metadata; for example, author, expiry date, and DRM Information (Digital Rights Management). Metadata is under access control. Assets supports the following various common metadata schemata out of the box:
Tagging: Assets can be tagged and classified. See organizing assets.
Renditions: A rendition is the binary representation of an asset. Assets always have a primary representation - that of the uploaded file. They can have any number of additional representations that are created, for example, by customized workflow steps or when an asset is uploaded. Renditions may be of a different size, with a different resolution, with an added watermark, or some other changed characteristic.
Versions: Versioning creates a snapshot of digital assets at a specific point in time. You can restore assets to previous versions. See versioning in Assets.
Sub-assets: Sub-assets are assets that make up an asset, for example, layers in an Adobe Photoshop file or pages in a PDF file. In Assets, you can manage sub-assets as you would assets.
You perform an action on an asset or collection. Actions can create or modify assets, collections, and renditions. Many of the basic actions you perform on assets - upload, delete, update, save sub-assets - trigger pre-configured workflows. These are automatically turned on in Assets and are described in detail in Assets media handlers.
The tasks you can perform with these pre-configured workflows:
You can apply workflows manually as well. See Assets Media Handlersfor a list of default workflows.
See Assets and Media Library for information on the differences.