Browse, search, and preview assets browse-search-preview-assets

Last update: Thu Jul 31 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Topics:
Desktop App

CREATED FOR:

User
Admin

You can browse to, search for, and preview the assets available in the Experience Manager repository, all from within the desktop application. Try the following in the app:

Browse to a folder and see some basic info of the assets available in the folder, along with small thumbnails of all assets.
To view more information and a larger thumbnail of an individual asset, click the filename.
Click Open or Edit to download the file locally and just view it or edit it in the native application, respectively.
Search using keywords to find a related asset in the Experience Manager repository. Use ? and * as wildcards. These wildcards substitute for a single character or for multiple characters, respectively. Filter and sort the results as necessary.

NOTE

The app displays the assets by matching the search criteria across multiple metadata fields and not just the asset’s title or the filename.

Open assets on your desktop openondesktop-v2

You can open the remote assets for viewing in the native application. The assets are downloaded to a local folder. Then they are launched in the native application associated with the file format. You can change the native application to open specific file types (extensions) in your Mac or Windows.

Click Open from the asset menu. The asset is downloaded locally and opened in the native application. Check the download progress and transfer speed of large assets in the status bar.

NOTE

If the expected changes are not reflected in the app, click refresh icon

or right click in the app interface and click Refresh. The actions are not available while larger downloads or uploads are in progress.

To open the local download folder of an asset, click and click Reveal File action.

Use or place assets into native documents place-assets-in-native-documents

In some cases, say when placing an asset into a native document, you access a file in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. To get to the file system location of the locally downloaded file, use the Reveal File option.

Reveal File action for an asset

Click Reveal File, or Reveal Folder on a folder, to open Windows Explorer or Mac Finder with the file or folder preselected on your local computer. As an example, the option is useful to place the Experience Manager files in the native applications that support placing or linking local files. To see how to place files in Adobe InDesign, see Placing graphics.

The Reveal File action opens a local network share. It displays only the assets that are available locally. That is, it displays assets that were revealed, downloaded, or opened/edited using the app. The local network share does not upload any changes to Experience Manager. To upload the changes, explicitly use the Upload Changes or Upload actions in the app.

NOTE

For backwards compatibility with Experience Manager desktop app v1.x, the files revealed are served from a local network share, exposing locally available files only. The desktop paths of the revealed files are the same as the paths created by app v1.x.

CAUTION

Do not use the Reveal File option to edit assets in native applications. Instead, use the Edit actions. To know more, see Advanced workflow: collaborate on the same files and avoid editing conflicts.

Manage special characters in asset names special-characters-in-filename

In the legacy app, the node names created in the repository retained the spaces and casing of the folder names provided by the user. For the current application to emulate the node naming rules of v1.10 app, enable Use legacy conventions when creating nodes for assets and folders in the Preferences. See app preferences. This legacy preference is disabled by default.

NOTE

The app changes only the node names in the repository using the following naming conventions. The app retains the Title of the asset as is.

Characters ‡

Legacy preference in app

When occurring in file names

When occurring in folder names

Example

. / : [ ] | *

Enabled or Disabled

Replaced with - (hyphen). A . (dot) in the filename extension is retained as is.

Replaced with - (hyphen).

myimage.jpg remains as is and my.image.jpg changes into my-image.jpg.

% ; # , + ? ^ { } " and whitespaces

Disabled

Whitespaces are retained

Replaced with - (hyphen).

My Folder. changes to my-folder-.

# % { } ? & .

Disabled

Replaced with - (hyphen).

NA.

#My New File. changes to -My New File-.

Uppercase characters

Disabled

Casing is retained as is.

Changed to lowercase characters.

My New Folder changes to my-new-folder.

Uppercase characters

Enabled

Casing is retained as is.

NA.

‡ The list of characters is a whitespace-separated list.

Find all edited images find-all-edited-images

The application provides a view, called Edited locally, to give you quick access to all the files that you downloaded locally (via Open or Edit actions) and then modified. The app allows you to select all locally edited assets and upload the changes in a few clicks. This view also displays the locally edited assets that have an editing conflict.

Filter to see all the locally edited assets