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Dynamic Media Journey: The Basics, Part I dm-journey-part1

This guide introduces Dynamic Media on Adobe Experience Manager, explaining how the system works, the core capabilities it delivers, and how it accelerates the creation, management, and delivery of rich visual media across web, mobile, and marketing channels. Dynamic Media enables organizations to serve interactive, responsive, and on-demand imagery and video from a single master asset, reducing production overhead and improving the customer experience across every touchpoint.

Prerequisites

Before beginning this journey, readers benefit from familiarity with the following areas, because Dynamic Media interacts directly with these formats, technologies, and design workflows:

What you can expect to learn

Part I

Part II

Audience

This journey is designed for the following roles that are new to Dynamic Media on Adobe Experience Manager:

What is Dynamic Media and how can it help you? dm-journey-a

Dynamic Media is an Adobe solution that enables brands and marketers to deliver rich visual merchandising and marketing assets on demand. Working from a set of primary source assets — such as images, video, and 3D — Dynamic Media generates and delivers multiple variations of this rich content in real time through its global, scalable, performance-optimized CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Key Capabilities

Dynamic Media creates and serves interactive viewing experiences, including:

Assets are dynamically scaled for consumption across web, mobile, and social sites. Because rendering happens in real time on the CDN, a single master asset can be reused across every channel and device size, eliminating the need to manually produce and store separate versions for each destination. This reduces production overhead and helps ensure a consistent brand experience wherever customers encounter the content.

Integration with Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Dynamic Media incorporates the workflows of the Adobe Experience Manager Assets digital asset management (DAM) solution to simplify and streamline the digital campaign management process. This integration means creative, marketing, and merchandising teams can manage source files, approvals, metadata, and delivery from a unified environment — connecting asset governance directly to omnichannel delivery.

One file with multiple delivery options

Adobe Dynamic Media operates on a single core principle: one primary asset file, multiple delivery options. Instead of duplicating and manually re-versioning media for every channel, device, or web page, Dynamic Media stores a single primary asset and generates every rendition on demand from that one source.

To appreciate why this matters, consider the traditional workflow for a single asset such as an image or a video. Teams typically create one primary asset and then manually produce versions of that same asset for every experience, every target device, every web page, and every property where the asset appears. Over time, that single asset can balloon to 20, 30, or more versions — often with no version history attached. Now multiply that effort across every image and video in a library. The volume of asset variants becomes overwhelming to maintain and update, and storage costs climb accordingly.

How Dynamic Media is different

Dynamic Media is fundamentally different from traditional systems because marketers and developers use Dynamic Media to deliver media dynamically from single, primary assets through URL calls. The Dynamic Media URL paths that a client requests contain embedded instructions that tell the Adobe publish server how to display the asset when it is delivered to a customer’s screen. As a result, the same single primary asset can be delivered instantly in unlimited renditions, with on-the-fly variations such as:

This means teams no longer need to pre-generate and store every possible variant. Instead, the URL itself defines the rendition, and the server produces it in real time.

Consistent quality across every screen and bandwidth

This delivery method ensures Adobe Dynamic Media sends consistent, high-quality experiences to any screen, regardless of size or bandwidth. Dynamic Media also optimizes full-size videos for all screen types and adaptively streams them, adjusting quality based on the viewer’s connection to preserve a smooth, uninterrupted user experience.

Adobe Dynamic Media ensures consistent, quality experiences are delivered to any screen, regardless of size or bandwidth.

Why “one primary asset, multiple delivery options” matters

Consolidating on a single primary asset produces several practical benefits that follow directly from the model:

As the following sections explain, this “one primary asset file, multiple delivery options” concept is the foundation for how Dynamic Media scales media delivery efficiently across web, mobile, and connected experiences.

The Content Delivery Network

When you are ready to go live with an image or video asset, Dynamic Media’s backbone — a powerful, top-tier delivery network serving hundreds of clients worldwide every day — supports it. Dynamic Media distributes assets across a Content Delivery Network (CDN) hosted by Akamai. The CDN is a distributed network of edge servers that work together seamlessly to deliver content, especially large rich media files, to end users around the globe.

How the CDN Works

Web content is stored in web caches positioned across the Internet, then served from the nearest cache directly to end users for faster delivery. The process works as follows:

Content arrives faster because it sits physically closer to the user, reducing network latency and round-trip time. This is the core mechanism that makes CDNs faster than traditional single-origin delivery.

Benefits for End Users and Businesses

A CDN delivers measurable advantages:

Performance and Scale

Operating at massive global scale, the CDN historically delivers:

These figures illustrate the throughput and reliability that Dynamic Media’s Akamai-backed CDN brings to rich media distribution.

Smart Imaging

Dynamic Media already optimizes assets and ensures that each asset loads quickly on mobile and desktop systems using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). To make that happen, Dynamic Media uses image presets to define the quality of your image. Image presets also define the type of image that you are sending, its sharpness, and other rendering parameters for different parts of your experiences or pages.

But to add value to Dynamic Media further beyond image presets, there is Smart Imaging.

Smart Imaging delivers a 22% to 47% performance improvement over standard Dynamic Media delivery, depending on your existing image preset settings and specific end-user characteristics — all while preserving image quality as if the asset were never touched.

How Smart Imaging Works

Smart Imaging provides even better image asset delivery performance by automatically optimizing an image’s format and file size based on a customer’s browser capability. It works with your existing image presets (image presets are discussed in Part II of this journey) and applies intelligence at delivery time.

This intelligence further reduces image file size based on browser and network connection speed. In short, Smart Imaging automatically optimizes an image’s format and file size based on a customer’s browser capability and network speed, adapting each delivery to the specific viewing conditions.

Performance and Business Impact

Because image assets make up most of a page’s load time, the performance improvement produced by Smart Imaging directly influences several key business indicators. Faster image delivery leads to:

The causal chain is straightforward: smaller, better-optimized images load faster, faster pages create smoother user experiences, and smoother experiences translate into stronger engagement and revenue outcomes.

How to Enable Smart Imaging

Adobe Dynamic Media technical support does not turn on Smart Imaging by default because it requires a coordinated effort. Enabling Smart Imaging also requires a complete clearing of your CDN cache, which is then refilled over time — this ensures that previously cached, unoptimized image variants are replaced with the newly optimized deliveries.

To use Smart Imaging, follow these steps:

This trial-then-activate approach allows you to validate the expected 22% to 47% performance improvement against your specific presets and audience before committing to a site-wide rollout.

Adaptive Video Sets

An Adaptive Video Set groups multiple encoded versions of the same source video — each rendered at a different bit rate and format — so that the optimal file can be delivered to any device under any network condition. This is Dynamic Media’s solution for streaming video smoothly across phones, tablets, and desktops without the publisher having to manually manage encoding, sizing, or delivery logic.

Why Video Delivery Is Complex

When a page contains video, customers typically engage with that content longer and remain on the page longer — a behavior pattern that Adobe has observed through its own analytics. Capturing that engagement, however, requires solving several technical problems at once:

Dynamic Media addresses these challenges by generating and serving an Adaptive Video Set in place of a single static file.

How Adaptive Video Sets Work

For example, on an iOS mobile device, Dynamic Media detects whether the connection is 4G, 5G, or Wi-Fi. Based on that signal, it automatically selects the appropriate encoded video from the various bit rates within the Adaptive Video Set and streams it to the device.

Automatic Quality Switching

Adaptive Video Sets respond continuously to viewing conditions:

Key Benefits

Using Adaptive Video Sets delivers:

Use cases for Dynamic Media dm-journey-b

The following are common use-case issues and solutions that Dynamic Media solves to drive positive customer engagement, loyalty, conversion, and increased Return on Investment (ROI).

Dynamic Media addresses recurring challenges faced by marketing, e-commerce, and digital experience teams that must deliver rich visual content at scale across every device, channel, and audience segment. By centralizing image, video, and interactive media production and delivery, Dynamic Media reduces manual production overhead, accelerates time-to-market, and ensures that customers see the right visual experience in the right context — which in turn strengthens engagement and lifts conversion rates.

Common Dynamic Media Use Cases

Each of these use cases links a concrete production or delivery problem to a measurable business outcome — reduced operational cost, faster launch cycles, stronger customer engagement, higher conversion, and improved long-term loyalty.

Use case: Primary file approach

The page-weight problem

Approximately 90% of a typical web page’s weight comes from rich media — images and video files that are often significantly heavier than other page components. The remaining 10% is HTML, CSS code, and specific tags. Reducing page weight and content size — whether for an image or a video — is one of the most important and most obvious use cases for Dynamic Media. Lighter pages load faster, perform better on mobile networks, and deliver a smoother experience across devices, all of which contribute to stronger engagement and conversion outcomes.

Content page weight of a typical web page.

Because rich media dominates page weight, optimizing that 90% is where Dynamic Media focuses. The core concept is one primary asset file with multiple delivery options, and this approach is central to reducing overall page weight.

The single primary file approach

A single primary asset can power many surfaces at once. For example, one product image can be reused on:

The watch is one primary asset file, but with multiple renditions of it – not copies – created on the fly.

This reuse is highly efficient and ensures visual consistency across every experience where the asset appears.

Issues Dynamic Media solves with the single-file approach

Why duplicating assets creates hidden costs

When teams create a separate asset for every kind of experience, one starting image typically becomes 20, 30, or 40 stored variations — each of which must be paid for and managed. Teams then have to ensure that the correct image is used in each context, which directly affects brand consistency. When an image cannot be located, teams end up duplicating assets again, compounding both storage and coordination costs.

Benefits of the one-file approach

Dynamic Media creates variations of images dynamically from that one starting image. Creative teams can work flexibly with the primary asset without repeatedly coordinating with the graphic design team or the photo studio to generate additional content. This directly reduces production costs and shortens time-to-market, because renditions are produced on demand rather than pre-built and warehoused.

With the one-file approach, a single primary file powers every downstream version. Renditions required across sites, properties, and customer experiences are generated only at the moment they are delivered to a customer. This efficiency substantially decreases the storage footprint required for assets and reduces overall workflow complexity. Dynamic Media’s delivery system guarantees that every image and video is optimized, loads quickly, and looks great on all screens and devices.

Use case: Video

Dynamic Media addresses one of digital commerce’s most demanding asset types: video. Video assets are inherently complex to manage, store, and distribute because of their large file sizes, multiple format requirements, and the need to render smoothly across a wide range of devices, screen resolutions, and network conditions. Without an automated pipeline, teams typically face manual transcoding, inconsistent playback quality, and slow load times — all of which directly impact brand perception and conversion.

Customers come to Dynamic Media with the following issues that they are hoping to solve:

“My business has the video, but avoided delivering it. Testing showed the video quality was inconsistent. This affects the brand and conversion.”

Inconsistent playback erodes user trust and increases bounce rates, because visitors interpret stalled or low-quality video as a signal of poor product or brand quality. Dynamic Media’s solution is to take that one primary video file and let Dynamic Media generate all the required sizes and encodings through its automated transcoding process. That output is then paired with Dynamic Media’s intelligent video player, which selects the optimal rendition in real time based on device and connection.

As a result, this workflow guarantees consistent, high-quality playback wherever the video appears — whether on the main landing page, a category page, or a product detail page — helping preserve brand integrity and supporting stronger conversion performance across the customer journey.

Here are several more use cases to consider.

Use case: Single source of truth

Use case: AI-powered Smart Cropping for rich media

Use case: Interactive media authoring

How an asset flows through the Dynamic Media system dm-journey-c

A typical Dynamic Media workflow moves an asset through three sequential phases: (1) Creation, (2) Authoring/Upload, and (3) Optimization and Publishing. The end result is a single primary asset delivered dynamically across web, print, email, desktop, and mobile channels from centralized Dynamic Media servers.

How an asset flows through the Dynamic Media system.

1. Creation phase — producing the primary asset

The workflow begins in the creation phase, where the goal is to produce a high-quality primary asset. These primary assets typically originate from:

Adobe Creative Suite applications support this stage, including Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator, which are used to design, retouch, and finalize the source content before it enters the Dynamic Media system.

2. Authoring phase — uploading into Dynamic Media

Once creation is complete, the finished asset is uploaded into the Authoring solution within Dynamic Media. During this phase, the correct image presets and viewers are configured and aligned with the various web pages on the site, so that each asset renders with the appropriate size, quality, and interactive behavior for its intended placement.

3. Publishing phase — optimization and multi-channel delivery

In the final phase, the content is optimized and published to Dynamic Media servers. This optimization prepares the asset for dynamic delivery, which enables a single master file to be reused efficiently across every output channel. Once published, the asset becomes available for delivery to:

This centralized publish-once, deliver-anywhere model ensures visual consistency across channels while reducing the need to store and manage separate renditions for each destination.

Uploading Assets into Dynamic Media

After creating a primary asset, upload it into Dynamic Media. The file type, format, and size are critical attributes that determine how Dynamic Media processes and delivers the asset. At the time of upload, ensure you extract the maximum value from the one-file support model.

For example, the watch image below measures 4560 x 3020 pixels. Even if you never intend to display an image at that full size, you should still upload it at the highest available resolution. The larger the source image, the better the quality Dynamic Media can deliver across every rendition — down to the smallest thumbnail — because Dynamic Media can downsample from a high-resolution master without introducing artifacts. Remember this key principle: you can easily decrease the resolution of an existing image, but attempting to increase the resolution of a low-resolution image produces unsatisfactory, pixelated results.

Considerations for Asset Uploads

Recommended file formats: Adobe recommends uploading assets in a lossless format. Avoid JPEG as a source format because each time you deliver or save a JPEG, image quality degrades due to its lossy compression. Instead, begin with the highest-resolution images in a lossless format. The preferred formats are typically:

Color space considerations: When planning for digital channels or web delivery, the default color space is RGB (Red, Green, Blue), which corresponds to how screens render color using light.

Most users do not consider delivering assets in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black) or why they would need to. CMYK is the standard color space for printed materials because it corresponds to the inks used in offset and digital printing presses. However, Dynamic Media supports delivery in both color spaces.

Many customers still rely on print production, including:

These customers require their images in both RGB and CMYK. Traditionally, meeting this requirement meant maintaining two separate files: one RGB version and one CMYK version. With Dynamic Media, however, you can upload CMYK assets directly, and Dynamic Media will automatically deliver RGB assets through an image preset or a color profile. This eliminates the need to create and manage multiple versions of the same file, preserving the core principle of one primary asset file with multiple delivery options.

Publish and preview assets

Publish assets in Dynamic Media

After you upload assets into Dynamic Media, publish them so they become deliverable to any customer-facing experience. To publish manually:

Publishing is required whenever you intend to use assets in any experience, because unpublished assets are not served through Dynamic Media’s delivery layer and therefore cannot be referenced from a live web page. Once assets are published, as a result they become available for inclusion in a web page in two ways:

Automatic publishing on upload

Beyond the manual workflow, Dynamic Media supports automatic publishing. You can configure Dynamic Media to instantly publish assets at the moment of upload, without any user intervention. This eliminates the manual publish step and shortens the time between ingesting a new asset and having it available for web delivery.

Preview asset renditions

After upload, Dynamic Media offers multiple ways to preview an asset’s renditions. Previewing shows you what a customer sees before the asset is embedded in production, which helps validate cropping, sizing, viewer behavior, and overall visual quality.

Preview with an image preset

A common preview method uses image presets:

The resulting URL path contains the image preset name (such as “Large”) and is the same URL you use in a web page.

Previewing a rendition of an asset based on the selected “Large” image preset. The resulting URL path contains the “Large” image preset name and is used in a web page.

The URL above is live! Try it.

Preview with a viewer preset

Another method to preview an asset uses viewer presets, which render the asset inside an interactive HTML5 viewer:

Previewing an asset based on the selected “ZoomVertical_light” viewer preset. The mouse pointer (+) was moved over the watch to zoom in. Notice the URL and Embed buttons.

The rendition above is live! Try it.

Optional - Learn more

Part I of this documentation covered the fundamentals of Dynamic Media in Adobe Experience Manager, a capability designed to deliver responsive, interactive rich media — including images, sets, and video — across web, mobile, and connected channels. To deepen your understanding of the concepts introduced in Part I, use the curated resources below. These supplementary materials expand on Dynamic Media workflows, configuration, and delivery patterns in greater technical detail. Otherwise, continue with Part II of this documentation. See What’s next in this Dynamic Media Journey.

Dynamic Media tutorials

Dynamic Media viewers

What’s next in this Dynamic Media documentation whats-next

Part II of this documentation continues the Dynamic Media journey with a deeper technical focus on asset delivery and multi-asset viewer experiences. Specifically, Part II covers:

Together, these topics build directly on the foundational concepts introduced in Part I and prepare you to configure richer, more interactive Dynamic Media experiences.

Continue to Dynamic Media: The Basics, Part II.