Generate For Placement Only renditions for Adobe InDesign fpo-renditions
When placing large-sized assets from Experience Manager into Adobe InDesign documents, a creative professional must wait for a substantial time after they place an asset. Meanwhile, the user is blocked from using InDesign. This interrupts creative flow and negatively impacts the user experience. Adobe enables temporarily placing small-sized renditions in InDesign documents to begin with. When the final output is required, say for print and publishing workflows, the original, full-resolution assets replace the temporary rendition in background. This asynchronous update in the background speeds up the design process to enhance productivity and does not hinder the creative process.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) provides renditions that are used for placement only (FPO). These FPO renditions have a small file size but are of the same aspect ratio. If an FPO rendition is not available for an asset, Adobe InDesign uses the original asset instead. This fallback mechanism ensures that the creative workflow proceeds without any breaks.
Approach to generate FPO renditions approach-to-generate-fpo-renditions
Experience Manager allows many methods to process images that can be used to generate the FPO renditions. The two most common methods are to use in-built Experience Manager workflows and to use ImageMagick. Using these two methods, you configure rendition generation of newly uploaded assets and of the assets that exist in Experience Manager.
You can use ImageMagick to process images, including to generate FPO renditions. Such renditions are downsampled, that is, the pixel dimensions of the rendition are proportionally reduced if the original image has PPI larger than 72. See install and configure ImageMagick to work with Experience Manager Assets.
Generate renditions of new assets using Experience Manager workflow generate-renditions-of-new-assets-using-aem-workflow
Following are the steps to configure DAM Update Asset workflow model to enable rendition generation:
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Click Tools > Workflow > Models. Select DAM Update Asset model and click Edit.
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Select Process Thumbnails step and click Configure.
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Click FPO Rendition tab. Select Enable FPO rendition creation.
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Adjust the Quality and add or modify Format List values as required. By default, the list of MIME types to generate the FPO rendition is pjpeg, jpeg, jpg, gif, png, x-png, and tiff. Click Done.
note note NOTE Rendition generation is supported for file types JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PSD, and BMP. -
To activate the changes, click Sync.
Generate renditions of new assets using ImageMagick generate-renditions-of-new-assets-using-imagemagick
In Experience Manager, DAM Update Asset workflow executes when a new asset is uploaded. To use ImageMagick to process renditions of newly uploaded assets, add a new command to the workflow model.
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Click Tools > Workflow > Models.
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Select DAM Update Asset model and click Edit.
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Click Toggle Side Panel in the upper left corner and search for command line step.
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Drag the Command Line step and add it before the Process Thumbnails step.
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Select Command Line step and click Configure.
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Add the desired information as custom Title and Description. For example, FPO rendition (powered by ImageMagick).
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In the Arguments tab, add relevant Mime Types to provide a list of file formats on which the command applies.
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In the Arguments tab, in the Commands section, add a relevant ImageMagick command to generate FPO renditions.
Below is an example command that generates FPO renditions in JPEG format, downsampled to 72 PPI, at 10% quality setting, and handles multi-layered Adobe Photoshop files by flattening the output:
convert -quality 10% -units PixelsPerInch ${filename} -resample 72 -flatten cq5dam.fpo.jpeg -
To activate the changes, click Sync.
For detailed information on ImageMagick command line capabilities, see https://imagemagick.org.
Generate renditions of existing assets using Experience Manager workflow generate-renditions-of-existing-assets-using-aem-workflow
To use Experience Manager workflow to generate FPO rendition of the existing assets, create a dedicated workflow model that uses the in-built FPO rendition option.
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Click Tools > Workflow > Models.
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To create a model, click Create > Create Model.
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Add a meaningful Title and Name.
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Select the model and click Edit. Click Page Information > Open Properties, and then select Transient Workflow. This improves scalability and performance.
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Click Save and Close.
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Click Toggle Side Panel in the upper left corner and search for process thumbnail step.
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Select Process Thumbnails and click Configure. Follow the configuration to generate rendition of new assets using Experience Manager workflow.
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To activate the changes, click Sync.
Generate renditions of existing assets using ImageMagick generate-renditions-of-existing-assets-using-imagemagick
To use ImageMagick processing capabilities to generate FPO rendition of the existing assets, create a dedicated workflow model that uses the ImageMagick command line to do so.
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Follow step 1 to step 3 from configuration to generate rendition of existing assets using Experience Manager workflow section.
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Follow step 4 to step 8 from configuration to generate rendition of new assets using ImageMagick section.
View FPO renditions view-fpo-renditions
You can check the generated FPO renditions after the workflow completes. In Experience Manager Assets user interface, click the asset to open a large preview. Open the left rail and select Renditions. Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcut Alt + 3 when the preview is open.
Click FPO rendition to load its preview. Optionally, you can right-click the rendition and save it to your file system.
Tips and limitations tips-limitations
- To use ImageMagick-based configuration, install ImageMagick on the same machine as Experience Manager.
- To generate FPO renditions of many assets or of the entire repository, plan and execute the workflows during low-traffic duration. Generating FPO renditions for a large number of assets is a resource-intensive activity and the Experience Manager servers must have sufficient processing power and memory available.
- For performance and scalability, see Fine-tune ImageMagick.
- For generic command line handling of assets, see command line handler to process assets.