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Search assets in AEM search-assets-in-aem

Adobe Experience Manager Assets delivers robust, intelligent asset search methods that drive higher content velocity. Teams reduce time to market through a seamless, intelligent search experience that combines out-of-the-box functionality with custom methods. The search assets capability is central to any digital asset management (DAM) system, because it determines how quickly users locate, reuse, and govern content – whether for further use by creatives, for robust management of assets by business users and marketers, or for administration by DAM administrators. Simple, advanced, and custom searches that you can perform via the Assets user interface or other apps and surfaces fulfill these use cases across the Assets user interface, connected apps, and other surfaces.

Asset search in AEM supports the following use cases, and this article describes the usage, concepts, configurations, limitations, and troubleshooting for each of these use cases.

Search assets using Omnisearch

Search assets using the Omnisearch field at the top of the Experience Manager web interface. To run a search:

By default, Location:Assets is pre-selected to limit the searches to DAM assets. This ensures results are scoped to DAM assets only. Path:/content/dam also displays when you are performing a search at the root level within the Files folder. If you navigate to any other folder, Path:/content/dam/<folder name> displays in the Omnisearch field to limit the search scope to the current folder. Experience Manager provides suggestions as you start typing a search keyword, which speeds up query entry and reduces mistyped searches.

Filter search results

Use the Filters panel to search for assets, folders, tags, and metadata. You can filter search results based on named predicates, including:

You can customize the Filters panel and add or remove search predicates using search facets. The File Type filter in the Filters panel uses mixed-state checkboxes. As a result, a first-level checkbox appears only partially checked until all of its nested predicates (formats) are selected.

Search collections

Experience Manager search capability supports searching for collections and searching for assets within a collection. See search collections.

Understand asset search interface searchui

The asset search interface in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets provides a centralized workspace for locating, filtering, sorting, and organizing digital assets. Mastering this interface and its available actions lets you retrieve the exact files you need quickly, refine large result sets with precision, and save frequently used searches for repeated use.

Figure: Understand Experience Manager Assets search results interface.

Search interface controls (A–O)

Each labeled control in the search results interface performs a specific function:

A. Save search as a smart collection. A smart collection is a dynamically updated set of assets defined by your saved search criteria, so any new asset matching those criteria is automatically included without manual updates.
B. Filters or predicates to narrow the search results. Applying filters or predicates restricts results to the assets that match your chosen attributes, which reduces noise and surfaces the most relevant files.
C. Display files, folders, or both, letting you scope results to the content type you are looking for.
D. Search location is the Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository, the central store for managed assets.
E. Access Saved Searches, so you can re-run previously stored searches without re-entering criteria.
F. Click Filters to open or close the left rail, which houses the filtering predicates.
G. Shows Assets as the default search scope.
H. Search location is the Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository.
I. Omnisearch field with the user-provided search keyword. Omnisearch is the unified search field where you type keywords to query assets across the DAM repository.
J. Select the loaded search results for further actions.
K. Sort by Created, Modified, Name, or None, so you can arrange results in the order most useful to your task.
L. Sort by Ascending or Descending order to control the direction of the applied sort.
M. Number of displayed search results out of the total search results, indicating how much of the full result set is currently loaded.
N. Close search.
O. Switch between card view and list view, letting you choose between a visual thumbnail layout and a compact, detail-oriented list.

Understanding these controls together makes asset retrieval faster and more accurate, because it allows you to combine keyword search, filtering, sorting, and saved searches into an efficient workflow.

Dynamic search facets dynamicfacets

Dynamic search facets let you find the desired assets faster from the search results page, displaying the dynamically updated number of expected search results in real time — even before you apply a filter. The expected number of assets is updated even before the search filter is applied. Seeing the expected count against each filter helps you navigate through the search results quickly and efficiently. Faceted navigation of this kind is a widely used pattern for narrowing large result sets, and surfacing counts up front reduces trial-and-error filtering.

Figure: See the approximate number of assets without filtering search results in search facets.

Default facet properties

Experience Manager Assets displays facet counts for two properties by default:

The damAssetLucene-9 indexing change

As of August 2023, Experience Manager Assets includes a new version 9 of the damAssetLucene index. The previous versions, damAssetLucene-8 and below, use the statistical mode to evaluate access control against a sample of the items for each search facet count.

damAssetLucene-9 changes the behavior of Oak Query facet counting to no longer evaluate access control on the facet counts returned by the underlying search index. As a result, search responses return faster, because the index no longer performs per-item permission checks during counting. Because of this change, users might be presented with facet count values that include assets they do not have access to. These users cannot access, download, or read any other detail of those assets, including their paths, or gain any further information about them.

Reverting to statistical mode

If you need to switch to the previous behavior (statistical mode), see Content Search and Indexing to create a custom version of the damAssetLucene-9 index. Adobe does not recommend switching to the secure mode due to the impact on search response times with large result sets.

For more information on Oak’s facet capabilities, including a detailed description of these modes, see Facets - Oak Documentation - Lucene Index.

Search suggestions as you type searchsuggestions

Adobe Experience Manager provides real-time search suggestions as you begin typing a keyword, proposing possible search keywords or phrases before you finish entering a query. Experience Manager generates these suggestions directly from the assets stored in the system, because it indexes all metadata fields to power fast, relevant search. As a result, the quality and completeness of your asset metadata directly determine how useful and accurate these suggestions are.

To generate search suggestions, the system draws on the values of five specific metadata fields. To improve the relevance and discoverability of your assets, populate the following fields with appropriate, descriptive keywords — doing so ensures that users see meaningful suggestions that match how they actually search:

Because Experience Manager builds suggestions from indexed metadata, completing these fields with accurate, well-chosen keywords is the most effective way to make assets easy to find. Sparse or empty metadata reduces the number and relevance of the suggestions that Experience Manager can offer during search.

Understand search results and behavior searchbehavior

Basic search terms and results searchbasics

You can run keyword searches from the OmniSearch field, the unified search bar in Experience Manager. The keyword search is a full-text search, meaning it matches terms across the popular metadata fields associated with each asset. The keyword search is not case-sensitive, so uppercase and lowercase queries return the same results. If more than one keyword is used, AND is the default operator between the keywords, so results must contain every term.

How results are ranked

The results are sorted by relevance, starting with the closest matches. For multiple keywords, the more relevant results are the assets that contain both terms in their metadata. The ranking follows a clear hierarchy within metadata:

Because relevance depends on metadata quality, assets with well-structured smart tags and complete metadata surface more prominently in search results.

Filtering, sorting, and refining results

To quickly find the relevant assets, the rich interface provides several refinement mechanisms:

Alternatively, you can rerun the search by changing the query in the OmniSearch field. When you change your search terms or filters, the other filters remain applied to preserve the context of your search.

Number of assets displayed

Experience Manager displays the first 100 assets in card view and 200 assets in list view when a search returns many results. As users scroll, more assets are loaded on demand. This lazy-loading approach improves performance because it avoids rendering the entire result set at once. Watch a video demonstration of the number of assets displayed.

Unexpected results

Occasionally, the search results include assets that do not appear to match the query. This typically happens because a keyword resides in a metadata field that is not immediately visible. For more info, see unexpected results.

Experience Manager can search many file formats, and the search filters can be customized to suit your business requirements. Contact your administrator to understand what search options are made available for your Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository and what restrictions your account has.

Search ranking and boosting searchrank

Search results are ranked by match precision: results matching all search terms in metadata fields are displayed first, followed by results matching any of the search terms in smart tags. This tiered ordering ensures that the most specific, closely matched assets surface ahead of broader partial matches.

Default search ranking order

For the example search woman running, the approximate order of display of search results is:

Because metadata-field matches take priority over smart-tag matches, and full-phrase matches take priority over single-word matches, assets with accurate, complete metadata rank higher and are easier for users to discover.

Boosting assets with promoted keywords

You can improve keyword relevance for particular assets so that the images for which you promote specific keywords appear at the top of the search results whenever those keywords are searched. This directly influences ranking, giving prioritized assets greater visibility for the keywords that matter most.

To promote an asset for a specific keyword:

Use this capability to deliberately boost the rank of high-priority assets in the search results for a targeted keyword, ensuring that the most relevant or important images consistently appear first. See the example video below. For detailed info, see search in Experience Manager.

Video: Understand how search results are ranked and how the rank can be influenced.

Configure asset batch size to display search results configure-asset-batch-size

Administrators can configure the batch size of assets that display when you perform a search in Experience Manager Assets, choosing from three available options: 200, 500, and 1000 assets. The asset search results display in multiples of the configured batch size as you scroll down to load additional results. Setting a lower batch size reduces the number of assets loaded per request, which directly reduces search response times, because fewer assets must be retrieved, processed, and rendered before results appear.

How incremental batch loading works

When you set a result count limit, Experience Manager Assets returns results in fixed-size increments rather than loading every matching asset at once. This incremental (lazy-loading) approach keeps the initial search fast and responsive, then loads more results only as you scroll.

For example, if you set the result count limit to a batch size of 200 assets, Experience Manager Assets displays the first 200 assets in the search results when you begin the search. As you scroll down to navigate through the results, Experience Manager Assets loads and displays the next batch of 200 assets. This process continues until all assets that match the search query are displayed.

Choosing the right batch size:

To configure the asset batch size

Advanced search scope

Experience Manager provides filters that apply to searched assets, letting you locate the desired assets faster. Filters narrow large asset libraries down to the exact items you need, which is essential when working across extensive digital asset repositories. Commonly used filtering methods include narrowing results to files or folders and restricting the search to a specific folder path, as described below. Some illustrated examples are shared below.

Search for files or folders: In the search results, display files, folders, or both. From the Filters panel, select the appropriate option to control which asset types appear. This is useful when you know whether the target is an individual asset or an entire folder, because it removes irrelevant result types from view. See search interface.

Search for assets within a folder: Limit the search to a specific folder to reduce noise and return only assets stored in that location. In the Filters panel, add the path of a folder. Only one folder can be selected at a time, which keeps the folder-scoped search precise and unambiguous. Restricting results to a single folder path improves relevance because the search engine evaluates only the assets contained within that path.

Figure: Limit search results to a folder by adding a folder path in the Filters panel.

Find similar images visualsearch

The Find Similar feature locates images that are visually similar to a user-selected image, helping you quickly surface related assets across a large content library. Experience Manager returns smart-tagged images from the Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository that closely match the selected image in visual content.

Steps to find visually similar images

Figure: Find similar images using the option in the card view.

Experience Manager relies on smart tagging to power this similarity matching. Because assets in the DAM repository are automatically analyzed and tagged based on their visual characteristics, the system can compare those characteristics and return the closest visual matches to the reference image. This means the results reflect actual visual resemblance rather than only file names or manual metadata.

Why use Find Similar

Adobe Stock images adobe-stock

From within the Experience Manager user interface, users can search Adobe Stock assets and license the assets they need directly, without leaving the authoring environment. This integration streamlines creative workflows by keeping asset discovery, licensing, and content authoring in a single interface.

To search and license Adobe Stock assets, add Location: Adobe Stock in the Omnisearch bar.

Users can locate Adobe Stock assets in Experience Manager through the following methods:

Dynamic Media assets dmassets

You can filter for Dynamic Media images by selecting Dynamic Media > Sets from the Filters panel. This filter locates and displays interactive Dynamic Media asset types that are grouped as sets, making it faster to isolate rich, viewer-ready assets from standard single images.

Applying the Sets filter surfaces the following Dynamic Media set types:

Because these assets are stored as grouped sets rather than individual files, filtering by Sets streamlines the process of locating interactive experiences directly, ensuring that carousels, spin sets, image sets, and mixed media sets appear together instead of being scattered among standalone image assets.

GQL search using specific values in metadata fields gql-search

GQL (Graph Query Language) full-text search lets you locate assets by the exact values of metadata fields such as title, description, and creator. GQL search returns only those assets whose metadata value exactly matches the search query. Both the property names (Creator, Title, and so on) and their values are case-sensitive, so precise capitalization is required for a match.

Supported metadata fields and facet syntax

Operator constraints

The properties path, limit, size, and orderby cannot be combined using the OR operator with any other property. These properties govern scope, result count, and ordering rather than metadata matching, so they must be applied independently.

Keyword rule for user-generated properties

The keyword for a user-generated property is its field label as it appears in the property editor, converted to lowercase with all spaces removed. This ensures that custom fields defined in the property editor map to a valid GQL keyword.

Search formats for complex queries

The following examples demonstrate how to build GQL queries for common matching scenarios:

The asterisk (*) acts as a wildcard, enabling prefix, suffix, and substring matching, while quotation marks group multi-word values so that the entire phrase is treated as a single search term.

Search assets from other Experience Manager offerings or interfaces search-assets-other-surfaces

Adobe Experience Manager connects its Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository to multiple connected Experience Manager solutions and interfaces, giving teams faster access to digital assets and streamlining creative workflows. Because these surfaces draw from the same underlying repository, asset discovery is unified: every workflow begins with either browse or search.

Why search behavior stays consistent

Search behavior remains largely consistent across these surfaces and solutions. This consistency results from the shared DAM repository underpinning each connected interface, so the core search experience—querying, filtering, and locating assets—works the same way regardless of which Experience Manager solution you are using. As a result, skills learned in one surface transfer directly to others.

What varies across solutions

Some search methods change because the following factors differ across the Experience Manager solutions:

The specific search methods are documented for the individual solutions at the links below. The universally applicable tips and behaviors are documented in this article, providing a single reference for the search practices that apply everywhere the DAM repository is connected.

Search assets from Adobe Asset Link panel aal

Adobe Asset Link gives creative professionals direct access to content stored in Experience Manager Assets from within their supported Adobe Creative Cloud applications: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. Because the connection lives inside an in-app panel, creatives work with managed, approved assets without leaving their design environment, keeping the creative workflow uninterrupted and reducing context switching.

Core capabilities

Creatives can seamlessly manage assets directly from the in-app panel. Key actions include:

This tight integration ensures teams use current, governed assets rather than local or outdated copies, supporting brand consistency across projects.

Visual search powered by Adobe AI

Asset Link also supports visual similarity search, allowing users to surface aesthetically related results. These visual search results are powered by Adobe AI machine learning algorithms, which help creative professionals find aesthetically similar images because the system matches images by visual characteristics rather than relying only on filenames or keywords. As a result, creatives can quickly locate on-brand or stylistically consistent imagery even when they do not know the exact file name.

See search and browse assets using Adobe Asset Link.

Search assets in Experience Manager desktop app desktop-app

The Experience Manager desktop app makes Assets easily searchable and directly accessible on a local desktop (Windows or Mac), allowing creative professionals to locate and open assets in their native desktop applications without downloading files manually. The app connects local desktop tools to the central Experience Manager repository, so creatives can work in familiar applications while keeping every asset synchronized with the source of truth.

Supported search capabilities

The application supports basic searches, giving creative professionals precise control over how they find assets. Search capabilities include:

Edit-and-save workflow

The desktop app streamlines the process of finding, editing, and returning assets to Experience Manager. The workflow follows these steps:

For detailed guidance, see browse, search, and preview assets in the desktop app.

Search assets in Brand Portal brand-portal

Brand Portal is a cloud-based Adobe Experience Manager offering that enables line-of-business users and marketers to efficiently and securely distribute approved, on-brand digital assets to audiences outside the core content team. Rather than granting broad access to the full asset repository, Brand Portal provides controlled distribution of only the assets that have been reviewed and cleared for use.

Brand Portal is designed to serve extended stakeholders, including:

Sharing only approved digital assets ensures brand consistency and reduces the risk of outdated, unlicensed, or off-brand content reaching external audiences. This controlled, secure model allows organizations to accelerate go-to-market activities while maintaining governance over how their brand is represented.

Search capabilities within Brand Portal help these users quickly locate the exact assets they need, streamlining asset discovery for large libraries and saving time when preparing campaigns, product launches, or partner enablement materials. See search assets on Brand Portal.

Search Adobe Stock images adobe-stock1

Users can search Adobe Stock assets and license the required assets directly from within the Experience Manager user interface, without leaving their existing workflow. This integration keeps discovery, licensing, and asset management in a single environment, so teams can source stock imagery and put it to use without switching applications.

To locate Adobe Stock assets in Experience Manager, use any of the following methods:

See manage Adobe Stock images in Experience Manager.

Search Dynamic Media assets search-dynamic-media-assets

To filter for Dynamic Media images, select Dynamic Media > Sets from the Filters panel. This filter displays Dynamic Media set assets, including:

While authoring web pages, authors can search for these sets directly from within the Content Finder, which streamlines the workflow by keeping asset discovery within the authoring environment. The Content Finder provides a dedicated filter for sets, available through a pop-up menu, so authors can quickly locate and place the correct set type without leaving the page they are building.

Search assets in Content Finder when authoring web pages content-finder

Content Finder enables authors to locate and reuse approved digital assets directly while building web pages, drawing on both local and remote Experience Manager repositories. Content Finder is the in-context search panel that surfaces images, documents, and other media from the Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository so authors place the right asset without leaving the page they are authoring.

Authors work with two complementary asset-sourcing capabilities:

Access remote assets with Connected Assets

For step-by-step guidance on searching and consuming assets stored on a connected, remote Experience Manager instance, see use remote assets.

Search collections collections

Adobe Experience Manager search capability enables you to search across collections and to search for assets within a collection. A collection is a grouping of related digital assets—such as images, documents, or videos—organized together so teams can manage and reuse them efficiently.

Experience Manager supports two distinct search modes:

This dual capability helps you retrieve the right content quickly, whether you need the full collection or a single asset within it. As a result, teams working with large asset libraries can navigate directly to the material they need instead of browsing folder by folder. For detailed steps, see search collections.

Content Advisor asset-picker

Launch URL and Capabilities

Content Advisor is available at https://[aem_server]:[port]/aem/assetpicker.html and lets you search, filter, and browse Digital Asset Management (DAM) assets in a specialized way. Content Advisor was called the asset picker in prior versions of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Developers can fetch the metadata of selected assets directly through Content Advisor.

Content Advisor launches with supported request parameters, such as asset type (image, video, text) and selection mode (single or multiple selections). These parameters set the context of Content Advisor for a particular search instance and remain intact throughout the selection. This ensures that the search scope you define at launch stays consistent for the entire selection session.

Content Advisor uses the HTML5 Window.postMessage message to send data for the selected asset to the recipient. Content Advisor operates only in browse mode and functions exclusively with the Omnisearch result page.

Request Parameters

Pass the following request parameters in a URL to launch Content Advisor in a particular context. Each parameter narrows or configures the selection experience so that users see only the relevant assets:

How to Access the Content Advisor Interface

To access the Content Advisor interface at https://[aem_server]:[port]/aem/assetpicker, follow these steps:

Limitations limitations

Text and Omnisearch Limitations

The search capability in Experience Manager Assets has the following documented limitations:

Visual (Similarity) Search Limitations

Visual search, also called similarity search, has the following limitations:

Performance Limitations

The search functionality can encounter performance limitations in the following scenario:

Search tips tips

See more Search best practices.

Some examples illustrating search samples

Exact-phrase search: Enclose keywords in double quotation marks to find assets that contain the exact phrase in the exact order specified. This narrows results to precise matches, which is useful when the order of words changes the meaning of a query.

Figure: Search behavior with and without quotation marks.

Search with the asterisk (*) wildcard for partial matching: To broaden a search, place an asterisk before or after a search word to match any number of characters. This allows you to capture every variation of a root word in a single query. For example, searching for run without an asterisk returns only exact matches and does not return assets containing any variation of the word, including in the metadata. An asterisk substitutes for any number of characters, expanding the match automatically. For example:

Figure: Illustrating use of asterisk wildcard in Asset search using an example.

Search with the question mark (?) wildcard for fixed-length matching: To broaden a search while controlling length, use one or more ? characters, where each ? matches exactly one character. Because the number of ? characters sets the required character length, the wildcard matches only words of a specific size. For example:

Figure: Illustrating use of question mark wildcard in Asset search using an example.

Exclude a keyword using the dash (-) operator: Use the dash (-) operator, which functions as a Boolean NOT, to search for assets that do not contain a keyword. For example:

Figure: Use of dash to search for assets not containing an excluded keyword.

Quick reference: Asset search operators

AI Search ai-search

AI Search is an advanced, intent-based search capability that understands the meaning and intent behind a user’s query rather than relying on exact keyword matches. AI Search uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver more accurate, context-aware results that align with what the user actually wants to find.

How AI Search Works

Unlike traditional keyword-based search, which looks for exact terms, AI Search interprets the relationships between words, concepts, and underlying user intent. It applies semantic understanding—analyzing meaning rather than matching literal strings—to connect a query with the most relevant content. As a result, users find what they are looking for even when their query is phrased differently, contains typos, or is written in another language. This makes search more forgiving of imperfect input and more effective at surfacing content that a rigid keyword match would miss.

Key Benefits of AI Search

Key benefits of AI Search include:

Examples for AI Search examples-ai-search

Example Prompt: Woman drinking coffee

AI Search understands the meaning and intent behind a query, whereas keyword-based search only returns literal text matches. This distinction determines which assets each method retrieves for the same prompt.

How Traditional Keyword Search Behaves

Traditional keyword-based search looks for exact matches of asset metadata. For the prompt Woman drinking coffee, it isolates the terms Woman, drinking, and Coffee, and returns only assets whose metadata includes all of these exact terms. As a result, relevant assets tagged with different but equivalent wording are missed.

How AI Search Behaves

AI Search matches semantically similar words because it interprets meaning and intent rather than requiring literal text matches. For the same prompt, it recognizes related terms and returns a broader, more relevant set of assets. Key capabilities include:

This semantic approach surfaces relevant assets that keyword-only search would overlook, improving retrieval accuracy for varied phrasing, alternate vocabulary, multiple languages, and typographical errors.

Enable or disable AI search in Admin view enable-disable-ai-search

AI Search in Admin view is controlled through a single configuration toggle in the Assets Omnisearch Configuration. This setting determines how the search experience behaves for administrators: enabling AI Search activates AI-powered search capabilities, while selecting Keyword reverts to standard keyword-based search. Complete the following steps to enable or disable AI Search in Admin view:

Configuration and administration tasks related to search functionality configadmin

Search configuration and administration encompass the setup, tuning, and ongoing maintenance activities that keep a search feature accurate, fast, and reliable. Configuration defines how content is indexed and how queries are matched, while administration covers the recurring operational work that keeps search results relevant over time. Together, these tasks determine the quality of every result a user sees.

Effective search administration directly improves the user experience: well-configured search returns the right content quickly, reduces failed or empty searches, and helps users find information without navigating through multiple pages.

Core Configuration Tasks

The initial configuration establishes how the search engine understands and retrieves content. Key configuration tasks include:

Ongoing Administration Tasks

Administration is a continuous process rather than a one-time setup. Routine tasks keep search performing well as content and usage patterns change:

Best Practices for Search Administration

By treating search configuration and administration as an ongoing discipline rather than a single installation step, administrators ensure that search remains fast, accurate, and genuinely useful as content grows and user needs evolve.

Search index configurations searchindex

Asset discovery depends directly on the indexing of Digital Asset Management (DAM) contents, including the associated metadata. When an asset and its metadata are indexed, they become searchable; content that is not indexed, or is indexed incompletely, cannot be reliably surfaced in search results.

Optimized indexing and correct search index configurations directly enable faster, more accurate asset discovery. This is because the search engine queries the index rather than the raw repository, so the quality, completeness, and structure of that index determine how quickly and precisely users can locate assets.

Key factors that influence discovery through indexing include:

Because indexing governs both the speed and the accuracy of asset discovery, maintaining well-configured, optimized indexes is essential to a reliable DAM search experience. For details on configuring and managing these indexes, see indexing.

Mandatory metadata mandatorymetadata

Mandatory metadata refers to metadata fields that must be populated for an asset before it can be used correctly in downstream business processes. Business users, administrators, or Digital Asset Management (DAM) librarians define which metadata properties are mandatory, establishing them as required fields that underpin cataloging, discovery, rights management, and workflow automation. When these required fields are enforced, assets remain reliably searchable, compliant, and usable across business processes.

Despite these requirements, some assets may lack this metadata. The most common causes include:

Because completeness cannot be guaranteed for every asset, the system continuously identifies gaps: assets with missing or invalid metadata are detected and reported based on the indexed metadata property. As a result, administrators gain visibility into non-compliant assets and can remediate them, ensuring that mandatory fields are consistently enforced across the repository.

To configure mandatory metadata, see mandatory metadata.

Modify search facets searchfacets

Search facets in Adobe Experience Manager Assets let you filter search results across defined attributes—such as file type, metadata, tags, size, or creation date—so you can narrow a large result set to exactly the assets you need. Faceted filtering speeds up discovery because it lets you progressively refine results instead of scrolling through every match, which is especially valuable in repositories that contain thousands of assets.

What search facets do

A facet is a filterable dimension of your asset metadata, and each facet is driven by a predicate—a configurable rule that defines how a given attribute is matched and displayed in the Filters panel. Adobe Experience Manager Assets provides an extensive library of in-built predicates together with a visual editor, so you can shape the filtering experience without custom development.

By default, the Filters panel includes several standard facets. Administrators can customize the Filters panel to modify these default facets using the in-built predicates.

Customizing the Filters panel

Administrators can tailor the Filters panel to match how their teams search. Using the in-built predicates and the editor, you can:

Customizing facets improves search precision, reduces the time spent locating assets, and gives users a filtering experience tuned to their content. For details on the available predicates and how to configure them, see search facets.

Extract text when uploading assets extracttextupload

You can configure Experience Manager to extract the text from the assets — the readable words, labels, and metadata contained inside files — when users upload assets, such as PSD or PDF files. Text extraction captures the embedded textual content of a file so that it can be stored, searched, and referenced independently of the visual asset itself.

How text extraction works

Because Experience Manager indexes this extracted text, the content of each file becomes searchable. As a result, users can locate assets by keywords found inside the documents rather than relying only on file names or manually applied tags. This enables users to search these assets directly by their extracted text content, which is especially valuable for large asset libraries where visual inspection alone is impractical.

Key benefits

See upload assets.

Custom predicates to filter search results custompredicates

Predicates define and create the search facets that power result filtering. A predicate is the underlying rule that determines how a given asset property becomes a selectable filter, and a facet is the resulting filter option a user sees. Administrators customize the search facets in the Filters panel using pre-configured predicates, and these predicates can be tailored through overlays to extend or modify the default filtering behavior. See create custom predicates.

Users and administrators can search for digital assets based on one or more of the following properties. Filters that apply to some of these properties are available by default, while additional filters can be custom-created to apply to the remaining properties. This flexibility means an organization is not limited to the out-of-the-box facets: custom predicates let teams surface exactly the properties that matter to their asset library, improving how quickly relevant images, documents, and media are located within large repositories.

Because many of these properties—such as Video Height, Video Width, Video Bitrate, and Audio Bitrate—accept a minimum and maximum range, filtering can be scoped precisely rather than limited to fixed categories. Property values tied to video renditions or source video metadata are only available for filtering when that metadata is present, so ensuring complete metadata across renditions directly improves the accuracy of these facets.

Work with asset search results aftersearch

Experience Manager provides several actions for the assets returned in your search results. After running a search, you can perform the following operations directly on the matching assets:

Sort search results sort

Sort search results to locate the required assets faster, because ordered results let you scan systematically instead of reviewing every item until you find the one you need. Sorting is available in list view, and only when you select Files from the Filters panel.

Assets uses server-side sorting to quickly sort every asset within a folder, regardless of how many it contains, or the results of a search query. Server-side sorting delivers faster and more accurate results than client-side sorting. Unlike client-side sorting, which arranges only the items already loaded in the browser, server-side sorting orders the complete result set at the source before returning it. This ensures the ordering is applied consistently across all matching assets, not just the subset visible on screen.

In list view, you can sort search results the same way you sort assets in any folder. Sorting works on the following columns:

Check detailed information of an asset checkinfo

The search result page lets you check the detailed information of any searched asset directly. From a single result, you can review an asset’s full metadata, read comments left by collaborators, and trace its complete version history.

View all metadata of an asset

To see all metadata of an asset:

Check comments and version history

To check the comments on an asset or its version history:

Sort the timeline activity, such as comments or versions, in chronological order to review the asset’s history in sequence and follow how the asset evolved from one entry to the next.

Figure: Sort timeline entries for a search asset.

Download searched assets download

Users can download searched assets and their renditions directly from the search results, using the same workflow as downloading regular assets from folders. Because renditions are included in the download, all available variations of an asset are retrieved together in a single action, ensuring you obtain the complete set of files without navigating away from the search results.

To download searched assets:

The download process for searched assets is identical to the standard folder-based download workflow, so no additional steps or separate procedures are required. For complete details on download options, formats, and settings, see download assets.

Bulk update metadata properties metadata-updates

You can make bulk updates to the common metadata fields of multiple assets simultaneously, saving time compared to editing each asset individually. To update metadata for several assets at once from the search results, follow these steps:

The previously existing metadata in the updated fields is overwritten. Because the update replaces existing values rather than appending to them, confirm your entries before saving to avoid unintentionally clearing or replacing data you want to keep.

Choosing the right method for bulk metadata updates:

In short, use the folder or collection method when the assets are already grouped in one place, and use the search-based method when the assets are distributed across folders or share a common attribute.

Smart collections smart-collections

A collection is an ordered set of assets that can bring together assets stored in different locations, because a collection contains only references to these assets rather than copies of them. This reference-based structure means the same asset can appear in multiple collections without duplicating storage. Collections are of the following two types:

Key distinction: A static collection is managed by hand, while a smart collection is driven by search criteria and stays current without manual maintenance.

Smart collections are created directly from search criteria, ensuring the collection always reflects the assets that match those conditions. From the Filters panel, select Files and click Save Smart Collection. See manage collections.

Create a version create-version

A version captures a snapshot of an asset at a specific point in time, allowing you to preserve, track, and revert to earlier states of that asset as it evolves. Create a version for the assets that display in the search results to maintain an accurate revision history and safeguard prior iterations.

To create a version, follow these steps:

You can also select multiple assets and create versions for them simultaneously, which streamlines version management when working with large sets of assets.

Create a workflow create-workflow

Similar to the Create Version capability, you can start a workflow directly on the assets that display in the search results. A workflow applies a defined sequence of automated and manual steps—such as review, approval, or content processing—to the assets you select, letting you act on multiple assets at once without opening each one individually.

To create a workflow:

Once started, the workflow runs against every selected asset according to the chosen model, applying the same set of steps consistently across the batch. This makes workflows an efficient way to process a group of assets together—for example, to route them for review or apply a standardized set of actions—rather than repeating the same operation on each asset.

Relate and Unrelate assets relate-unrelate-assets

Relate and unrelate assets directly from your search results to manage the associations between related digital assets. Relating assets establishes a defined relationship between two or more assets, while unrelating assets removes that association. These relationships link items such as a source file and its rendition, a design file and its exported output, or a group of assets that belong to the same campaign, project, or collection.

Why relate assets

Establishing relationships between assets keeps connected content grouped and discoverable. This ensures that when you locate one asset, you can quickly navigate to the assets associated with it, reducing the effort required to track down dependent or derivative files. Common practical applications include:

How to relate assets

To relate assets from the search results:

The selected assets are then linked, establishing a relationship between them.

How to unrelate assets

To unrelate assets and remove an existing association:

The association between the selected assets is removed, while the assets themselves remain intact and available in the system.

Navigate to asset folder location navigate-asset-folder-location

Locating the folder that contains an asset lets you move directly from a search result to the asset’s actual storage location within the repository, making it easy to view related files, verify context, or perform further folder-level actions.

To navigate to the folder location for an asset displayed in the search results, follow these steps:

As a result, the interface opens the folder that contains the selected asset, displaying the asset within its parent folder location. This ensures you can immediately see where the asset resides in the folder hierarchy alongside any neighboring files.

Unexpected search results and issues unexpected-results

See also