Metadata in Assets Essentials metadata

Metadata means data or description about the data. For example, your images as an asset can contain information about the camera it was clicked with or any copyright information. This information is metadata of the image. Metadata is critical for efficient asset management. Metadata is the collection of all the data available for an asset but it may not necessarily be contained in that asset.

Metadata helps you further categorize assets and is helpful as the amount of digital information grows. It is possible to manage a few hundred files based on just the filenames, thumbnails, and memory. However, this approach is not scalable. It falls short when the number of people involved and the number of managed assets increase.

With the addition of metadata, the value of a digital asset grows, because the asset becomes,

For these reasons, Assets provides you with the right means of creating, managing, and exchanging metadata for your digital assets.

View the metadata view-metadata

To view the metadata of an asset, browse to the asset or search the asset, select the asset, and click Details in the toolbar.

Figure: To view an asset and its metadata, click Details from toolbar or double-click the asset.

The basic metadata such as title, description, and upload date is available in the Basic tab. The Advanced tab contains more advanced metadata such as camera model, lens details, and geotags. The Tags tab contains auto-applied tags based on the contents of the image.

Update metadata update-metadata

Once Admin configures the metadata form, other fields can be updated manually. You may want to change this because it reads only based on out of the box metadata form.

Smart Tags smart-tags

Experience Manager Assets uses artificial intelligence provided by Adobe Sensei to automatically apply relevant tags to all your uploaded assets. These tags, aptly named Smart Tags, increase the content velocity of your projects by helping you find relevant assets quickly. The smart tags are an example of metadata that is not contained in the image.

The smart tags are applied in near real time and are generated based on the contents of the image. When you upload an asset, the user interface displays Processing on the asset thumbnail for some time. Once the processing is complete, you can view the metadata and the smart tags.

Figure: To view the Smart Tags of an asset, click Details from toolbar or double-click the asset.

Smart tags also contain a confidence score as a percentage. It indicates the confidence associated with the applied tag. You can moderate the automatically applied smart tags.

Add or update keywords manually-tag

You may add more tags to your assets, in addition to the Smart Tags that are added automatically using the Adobe Sensei smart service. Open an asset for preview, click Tags, and type the desired keywords in the Keywords field. To add the tag, press Return. Assets Essentials indexes the keyword in near real time and your team can soon search the updated assets using the new keywords.

You can also remove tags from the Smart Tags section that are automatically added by Assets Essentials to all the uploaded assets.

Taxonomy management taxonomy-management

Tags can also be nested into a hierarchy to support relationships like category and sub-category. If you need to insert hierarchical tags, they are easily managed by Administrator in the Taxonomy Management section of Settings. You can create a governed set of namespaces and tags that all users can access to use while describing content. Only the Administrators can set up tag hierarchies in Taxonomy Manager ensuring that the values are controlled and used consistently.

Setup Metadata Forms metadata-forms

Assets Essentials provides many standard metadata fields by default. Organizations have additional metadata needs and need more metadata fields to add business-specific metadata. Metadata forms let businesses add custom metadata fields to an asset’s Details page. The business-specific metadata improves the governance and discovery of its assets. You can create forms from scratch or repurpose an existing form.

You can configure metadata forms for different types of assets (different MIME types). Use the same form name as the file’s MIME type. Assets Essentials automatically match uploaded assets MIME type to the name of the form and updates the metadata for the uploaded assets based on the form fields.

For example, if a metadata form by the name PDF or pdf exists, then the uploaded PDF documents contain metadata fields as defined in the form.

Assets Essentials uses the following sequence to search for existing metadata form names to apply the metadata fields to the uploaded assets of a particular type:

MIME subtype > MIME type > default form > Out-of-the-box form

For example, if a metadata form by the name PDF or pdf exists, then the uploaded PDF documents contains metadata fields as defined in the form. If a metadata form by the name PDF or pdf does not exist, Assets Essentials match if there is a metadata form by the name application. If there is a metadata form by the name application, the uploaded PDF documents contain metadata fields as defined in the form. If Assets Essentials still does not find a matching metadata form, it searches for the default metadata form to apply metadata fields defined in the form to the uploaded PDF documents. If none of these steps work, Assets Essentials applies metadata fields defined in the out-of-the-box form to all the uploaded PDF documents.

To create a metadata form, follow these steps:

Watch this video to view the sequence of steps:

Once a form is created, it is automatically applied when users upload an asset of the matching MIME type.

To reuse an existing form to create a new form, select a metadata form, click Copy from the toolbar, provide a name, and click Confirm. You can edit a metadata form to change it. When you change a form, it is used for assets uploaded after the change. It does not change the existing assets.

Property components property-components

You can customize your metadata form using any of the following property components. Simply drag and drop the component type onto the form in the desired location and modify the component settings.
Below is an overview of each property type and how they are stored.

Assign metadata form to folders assign-metadata-form-folder

You can also assign a metadata form to a folder within your Assets Essentials deployment. The metadata form assigned to a folder as per the MIME type is overwritten when you apply a metadata form to a folder manually. All assets in the folder, including assets in the sub-folders, then display properties defined in the metadata form.

To assign a metadata form to a folder:

Remove metadata form from folders remove-metadata-form-folder

After assigning a metadata form to one or multiple folders, Experience Manager Assets also enables you to remove metadata form from the selected folders.

To remove a metadata form from a folder:

You can also navigate to the folder details page and select System mapped Metadata Form from the Metadata Forms field to remove the assigned metadata form from a folder.

Working with Link component in metadata form link-component-metadata-form

The link component is used to enable external URLs including storage links, copyright information, contact forms, and so on. To use link component on metadata form, you need to configure metadata form. The URL component can be mapped to a particular metadata property in the Metadata Editor page, which works in the same way as other metadata components. This metadata form can be assigned to folders. Thus in the assigned Folder asset’s detail page, you may see the asset link metadata value.

Follow the steps below to use link component on the asset details page:

Next Steps next-steps