XMP metadata

Last update: October 8, 2024

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XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) is the metadata standard used by Experience Manager Assets for all metadata management. XMP provides a standard format for the creation, processing, and interchange of metadata for a wide variety of applications.

Aside from offering universal metadata encoding that can be embedded into all file formats, XMP provides a rich content model and is supported by Adobe and other companies, so that users of XMP in combination with Assets have a powerful platform to build upon.

XMP overview and ecosystem

Assets natively supports the XMP metadata standard. XMP is a standard for processing and storing standardized and proprietary metadata in digital assets. XMP is designed to be the common standard that allows multiple applications to work effectively with metadata.

Production professionals, for example, use the built-in XMP support within Adobe’s applications to pass information across multiple file formats. The Assets repository extracts the XMP metadata and uses it to manage the content lifecycle and offers the ability to create automation workflows.

XMP standardizes how metadata is defined, created, and processed by providing a data model, a storage model, and schemas. All of these concepts are covered in this section.

All legacy metadata from EXIF, ID3, or Microsoft Office is automatically translated to XMP, which can be extended to support customer-specific metadata schema, such as product catalogs.

Metadata in XMP consists of a set of properties. These properties are always associated with a specific entity referred to as a resource; that is, the properties are “about” the resource. In the case of XMP, the resource is always the asset.

XMP defines a metadata model that can be used with any defined set of metadata items. XMP also defines particular schemas for basic properties useful for recording the history of a resource as it passes through multiple processing steps, from being photographed, scanned, or authored as text, through photo editing steps (such as cropping or color adjustment), to assembly into a final image. XMP allows each software program or device along the way to add its own information to a digital resource, which can then be retained in the final digital file.

XMP is most commonly serialized and stored using a subset of the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is in turn expressed in XML.

Advantages of XMP

XMP has the following advantages over other encoding standards and schemata:

  • XMP-based metadata is very powerful and fine-grained.
  • XMP lets you have multiple values for one property.
  • XMP has standardized encoding, which lets you easily exchange metadata.
  • XMP is extensible. You can add additional information into your assets.

The XMP standard is designed to be extensible, allowing you to add custom types of metadata into the XMP data. EXIF, on the other hand, does not - it has a fixed list of properties that cannot be extended.

NOTE
XMP generally does not allow binary data types to be embedded. To carry binary data in XMP, for example, thumbnail images, they must be encoded in an XML-friendly format such as Base64.

XMP core concepts

Namespaces and schemata

An XMP schema is a set of property names in a common XML namespace that includes
the data type and descriptive information. An XMP schema is identified by its XML namespace URI. Using namespaces prevents conflicts between properties in different schemas that have the same name but a different meaning.

For example, the Creator property in two independently designed schemas might mean the person who created the asset or it could mean the application that created the asset (for example, Adobe Photoshop).

XMP properties and values

XMP may include properties from one or more of the schemas. For example, a typical subset used by many Adobe applications might include the following:

  • Dublin core schema: dc:title, dc:creator, dc:subject, dc:format, dc:rights
  • XMP basic schema: xmp:CreateDate, xmp:CreatorTool, xmp:ModifyDate, xmp:metadataDate
  • XMP rights management schema: xmpRights:WebStatement, xmpRights:Marked
  • XMP media management schema: xmpMM:DocumentID

Language alternatives

XMP offers you the ability to add an xml:lang property to text properties to specify the language of the text.

XMP writeback to renditions

This XMP writeback feature in Adobe Experience Manager Assets replicates the metadata changes to the renditions of the original asset.
When you change the metadata for an asset from within Assets or while uploading the asset, the changes are initially stored in the metadata node in the asset hierarchy. The writeback feature lets you propagate the metadata changes to all or specific renditions of the asset. The feature writes back only those metadata properties that use jcr namespace, that is, a property named dc:title is written back but a property named mytitle is not.

For example, consider a scenario where you modify the Title property of the asset titled Classic Leather to Nylon.

metadata

In this case, Assets saves the changes to the Title property in the dc:title parameter for the asset metadata stored in the asset hierarchy.

metadata stored in asset node in the repository

IMPORTANT
The writeback feature is not enabled by default in Assets. See how to enable metadata writeback. MSM for digital assets does not work with metadata writeback enabled. Upon writeback, the inheritance breaks.

Enable XMP writeback

DAM Metadata Writeback workflow is used to writeback the metadata of an asset. To enable writeback, follow any of the following three methods:

  • Use Launchers.
  • Manually start DAM MetaData Writeback workflow.
  • Configure workflow to be part of the post-processing.

To use Launchers, follow these steps:

  1. As an administrator, access Tools > Workflow > Launchers.

  2. Select the Launcher for which the Workflow column displays DAM MetaData Writeback. Click Properties from the toolbar.

    Select DAM metadata writeback launcher to modify its properties and activate it

  3. Select Activate on the Launcher Properties page. Click Save & Close.

To manually apply the workflow to an asset just once, apply DAM Metadata Writeback workflow from the left rail.

To apply the workflow to all the uploaded assets, add the workflow to a post-processing profile.

See also

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