The Core Component Image Component is an adaptive image component that features in-place editing.
The Image Component features adaptive image selection and responsive behavior with lazy loading for the page visitor as well as easy image placement and cropping for the content author.
The image widths and additional settings can be defined by the template author in the design dialog. The content editor can upload or select assets in the configure dialog.
The current version of the Image Component is v3, which was introduced with release 2.18.0 of the Core Components in February 2022, and is described in this document.
The following table details all supported versions of the component, the AEM versions with which the versions of the component is compatible, and links to documentation for previous versions.
Component Version | AEM 6.4 | AEM 6.5 | AEM as a Cloud Service |
---|---|---|---|
v3 | - | Compatible | Compatible |
v2 | Compatible | Compatible | Compatible |
v1 | Compatible | Compatible | - |
For more information about Core Component versions and releases, see the document Core Components Versions.
The Image Component comes with robust responsive features ready right out of the box. At the page template level, the design dialog can be used to define the default widths of the image asset. The Image Component will then automatically load the correct width to display depending on the size of the browser window. As the window is resized, the Image Component dynamically loads the correct image size on the fly. There is no need for component developers to worry about defining custom media queries since the Image Component is already optimized to load your content.
In addition, the Image Component supports lazy loading to defer loading of the actual image asset until it is visible in the browser, increasing the responsiveness of your pages.
See the section Adaptive Image Servlet for more technical details on these features and tips for optimizing rendition selection.
The Image Component (as of release 2.13.0) supports Dynamic Media assets. When enabled, these features offer the ability to add Dynamic Media image assets with a simple drag-and-drop or via the assets browser just as you would any other image. In addition, image modifiers, image presets, and smart crops are also supported.
Your web experiences built with Core Components can no feature rich, Sensei-powered, robust, high-performance, cross-platform Dynamic Media Image capabilities.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are supported by the Image Component.
For security reasons, the original SVG is never called directly by the Image Editor. It is called through <img src=“path-to-component”>
. This prevents the browser from executing any scripts embedded in the SVG file.
SVG support requires release 2.1.0 of the Core Components or higher along with service pack 2 for AEM 6.4 or higher to support the image editor features within AEM.
To experience the Image Component as well as see examples of its configuration options as well as HTML and JSON output, visit the Component Library.
The latest technical documentation about the Image Component can be found on GitHub.
Further details about developing Core Components can be found in the Core Components developer documentation.
The Image Component supports schema.org microdata.
The image component offers a configure dialog where the image itself is defined along with its description and basic properties.
Inherit featured image from page - This option uses the featured image of the linked page or the featured image of the current page if the image is not linked.
Alternative text for accessibility - This field allows you to define a description of the image for visually impaired users.
dc:description
metadata in DAM or of the current page if no asset is linked.Image asset
Don’t provide an alternative text - This option marks the image to be ignored by assistive technologies like screen readers for cases where the image is purely decorative or otherwise conveys no additional information to the page.
&
, regardless of which Preset Type is selected.dc:title
metadata in DAM.Smart Crop and Image Preset are mutually exclusive options. If an author needs to use an image preset along with a Smart Crop rendition, the author will have to use the Image Modifiers to manually add presets.
The Image Component supports the AEM Style System..
Use the drop-down to select the styles that you want to apply to the component. Selections made in the edit dialog have the same effect as those chosen from the component toolbar.
Styles must be configured for this component in the design dialog in order for the drop down menu to be available.
You can define a list of widths in pixels for the image and the component will automatically load the most appropriate width based on browser size. This is an important part of the responsive features of the Image Component.
See the section Adaptive Image Servlet for more technical details on its features and tips for optimizing rendition selection by carefully defining your widths.
The Image Component supports the AEM Style System.
The Image Component uses the Core Component’s Adaptive Image Servlet. The Adaptive Image Servlet is responsible for image processing and streaming and can be leveraged by developers in their customizations of the Core Components.
The Adaptive Image Servlet will try to pick the best rendition for the requested image size and type. It’s recommended that DAM renditions and Image component allowed widths are defined in sync so that the Adaptive Image Servlet does as little processing as possible.
This will improve performance and avoid some images not being correctly processed by the underlying image processing library.
Conditional requests via the Last-Modified
header are supported by the Adaptive Image Servlet, but the caching of the Last-Modified
header needs to be enabled in the Dispatcher.
The AEM Project Archetype’s sample Dispatcher configuration already contains this configuration.
The Image Component supports the Adobe Client Data Layer.