Using Metadata Import and Export in AEM Assets

In this video, we’re going to be covering AEM Assets metadata import capability. With the metadata import feature, Asset users can import metadata into AEM from a CSV file, making it much easier to bulk update metadata for a large number of assets. First let’s navigate to the adventures folder which contains the assets we would like to update. Clicking into one of the subfolders and viewing the properties of one of the images, we can see that the copyright field under the advanced tab is blank.

Let’s perform a bulk update to all of the images in the adventures folder and subfolders to contain the same copyright information. Since there are over 70 images in these folders, performing this manually would take some time. Instead, we will use the metadata import feature. Let’s take a look at the CSV file that we will be using for our bulk metadata update. The first row in the CSV file begins with asset path and contains all of the metadata properties that will be updated. Note that the asset path is the absolute path of the asset’s location in AEM. The other column names correspond to the metadata property and its type. The rows below point to the individual assets and the corresponding property values. Note that the asset values are case sensitive. Property value can be left empty, and the metadata property for that asset will not be added or modified. Constructing the CSV file from scratch can also be time-consuming. It’s often easier to first do a metadata export of the files and properties you want to update. The CSV file I have opened was generated using the export metadata feature. Here we see that every asset has been given the value copyright WKND Site in the DC rights column. Now let’s import the CSV file to AEM Assets. Click on the create button, select the metadata option, and upload the CSV file. We can either import the metadata now or specify a later date and time to execute the import. We will import the metadata now. This form allows us to override some of the default import settings. We can override what column includes the asset path, choose columns to ignore, and customize which characters are used as delimiters and separators. The default value for batch size is 50, but it can be decreased or increased up to 100. When we click import, an asynchronous job runs in the background performing the bulk asset metadata import. Once the job is complete, users get notified via the AEM inbox. Clicking this inbox notification, we see that the metadata import feature is complete. Here we see a record of the input CSV file and the results CSV. The results CSV file will include an additional column to know the status of the individual assets metadata update. This will be either a success or fail value. Reviewing the results CSV, we can see that all of the assets were successfully updated.

Finally, let’s navigate back to our asset in the adventures folder and take a look at the metadata properties. The asset now displays the updated copyright information. -