Metadata

Transcript

An integral aspect of asset management, important as the file itself, is the asset’s metadata. Metadata is simply data that describes the file. AEM Assets has rich capabilities built around asset management. Simply select an asset and tap properties from the top action bar to open the asset’s detail and metadata. Metadata enables users to find assets, understand them more fully and make decisions on how they should be managed and used. AEM organizes the asset’s metadata across a series of tabs. Each piece of exposed metadata is described in a field. This asset has a multitude of metadata fields, ranging from simple fields like title and description to read-only fields like created date, width and height to licensing information and IPTC data.

Notice the open asset is an image and because of this several image-specific metadata fields describing the images dimensions display on the basic tab. Metadata fields and their organization across tabs can be customized by assets administrators, allowing for tailored experiences across different assets. For instance, a PDF asset doesn’t have a pixel width or height, but rather a PDF title which conversely, the image did not have. This metadata can be as similar or different as needed across assets. It’s worth noting that, upon asset upload, AEM has the ability to extract XMP metadata, which is an industry standard format for storing metadata in the file itself.

This powerful and time-saving capability serves as useful metadata stored by programs generating the asset, such as Photoshop or Indesign or by the source hardware itself, such as cameras that can record GPS data, aperture settings or frames per second.

Upon uploading AEM, we can see that this image, which had XMP meta data set on it in Adobe Photoshop, automatically has the XMP metadata extracted and displayed in the assets properties.

AEM even writes back metadata to the binary file in XMP format whenever metadata is added or changed via the properties interface, ensuring the metadata in AEM is always in sync with what’s in the asset for when it’s downloaded or shared, allowing other programs and systems to benefit from the metadata managed in AEM.

Here we see when we open the image in Adobe Photoshop, which can read XMP metadata, all the metadata that was authored in AEM Assets is available to us outside of AEM in our application. -