Organize your digital assets

Last update: March 14, 2024

CREATED FOR:

  • User
VersionArticle link
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud ServiceClick here
AEM 6.5This article

All digital assets, metadata, and content of Microsoft® Office and PDF documents are extracted and made searchable. Search allows sophisticated filtering on assets and fully 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, using, for example, tags. Users can edit tags in the DAM Asset Editor where subassets, renditions, and metadata are displayed.

Organize assets in folders

The most basic way to organize assets is to save these 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 use appropriate profiles to use for asset processing:

    • 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

Using tags, as a metadata, you can easily search assets, create collections using the search results, boost search ranking for some assets, and use artificial intelligence algorithms of Adobe Sensei for asset discovery.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets uses a self-learning algorithm to create highly descriptive tags that let you find the right asset in just a few clicks. Smart tagging uses Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s 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

For more information, see the following articles:

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 that 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 also 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.

Organize your assets 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.

Related Articles

Experience Manager


The True Cost of a Failed Implementation

Online | Session | General Audience

A failed implementation isn’t just an inconvenience — it costs real revenue. Poor execution and misaligned tools disrupt pipelines,...

Wed, Mar 19, 2:00 PM PDT (9:00 PM UTC)

Register

Put the Customer at the Center and Build Relationships That Last a Lifetime

Online | Strategy Keynote | General Audience

First impressions last a lifetime. Great first impressions feel personal, connected, and relevant right from the start. From the first...

Wed, Mar 19, 2:30 PM PDT (9:30 PM UTC)

Register

Connect with Experience League at Summit!

Get front-row access to top sessions, hands-on activities, and networking—wherever you are!

Learn more

Register now