AEM Assets videos and tutorials overview

Transcript

Welcome to Assets 101 Demo Version 2, an in-product Adobe Experience Manager assets overview and best practices demo. This demo follows the story of a dam administrator needing to provide a media kit, a set of approved curated content to various endpoints and stakeholders, promoting a new weekend branded bicycle tour. In order to provide this media kit, our dam administrator will do a lot of dam management functions including uploading assets, tagging assets, searching, creating collections of assets, our media kit, editing images, downloading, sharing, publishing, and using assets in a sites page. To start this demo, log in to AEM Assets and navigate to the Assets 101 Start folder. Since the goal of this demo is to provide a media kit in a few ways to various stakeholders, we need to start adding to our bucket of content and then select a subset of the assets for the final media kit. I’ll add some files into this working folder by dragging a few files over from my desktop. Once added, this kicks off asset processing, generating a series of static renditions as well as extracting and adding metadata to the assets. To build my media kit, I’ll use search to find assets tagged with my platinum tour tag, the name of the weekend promotion. I want to make sure that this and all my images are picked up in search when I build my media kit on search results. Let’s check the tags to make sure that this will show up in search. Double click to see the metadata and go to tags. If it weren’t tagged, I’d add this tag this way. I can navigate here on this tag list and make sure the tag is selected and that will attach it to the image. In reality, that exercise wasn’t actually needed as this asset start folder has a metadata profile attached to it that will always add that specific tag to any assets added to this folder, automating that tagging tour. Check on any other assets for this tag. I’ll reorganize some files and sub folders by dragging them into the main folder, navigate into the logos folder, select a few and drag them to the folder above in this case. Assets lets you move files around with a simple drag and drop between folders. Now is a good time to create a collection of virtual folder that I can add assets from all over the dam as references without having to move them out of their folder. Go to collections, click create and I’ll name this one platinum promo collection media kit. Now I have a virtual folder to create my media kit. To do that, I’m going to search on the platinum tag and add some of the resulting assets to my new collection. Before I start that searching process, I remember seeing a great image of a mountain biker on a mountain trail in Switzerland that I should use in my media kit. I’ll search on that image now and tag it for this media kit use. Once located, I choose the corner menu to go to that folder to see its location and that’s going to jump me to that folder. I’ll double click on the image and go to its tag section and go ahead and add my platinum tag to this image. Now I’m finally ready to add the content to my platinum collection folder by searching on the term platinum and then selecting what I want out of the search results and add them to the collection by selecting the items that I want and clicking on the add to collection button. I’ll target which collection I want to add them to my new platinum collection and then they will be added to that collection. I can share this collection right now easily by going to collections, selecting the collection and click share link. Copy the share link and show what the recipient sees. I’ll open a new browser window and paste that link. Anyone I send this to will see this collection window with options to download any of these assets. Having demoed how to share a collection with the share link, I noticed I forgot to add my Swiss Mountain biker image to my collection. So using search I’ll quickly correct this mistake, find the image and add it back into my platinum collection. I just got an email from a colleague that wants the Swiss Mountain biker image edited a bit so I can download it immediately and edit it in Photoshop. But better still, we can add our desired edit notes and comments as comments on the image and then search on them in Photoshop. So to do this I’m going to go to this image detail page and add a comment using the comments tools. Click the comment icon and use any pencil tool to add an area and add a comment. Here I’ll type in add more mountain bikers in the background headed towards the glacier. I’ll add another comment in order to change the ratio and extend the background a bit but essentially change the shape of this image. These comments are searchable metadata. Now in Photoshop I’ll use asset link to interact with my dam. Asset link is a connector between Photoshop and the dam. I can navigate through my folders in the dam if I knew where that Swiss Mountain biker image was located. However I recall I didn’t move it into any working folder but just tagged it with platinum tag and also my comments. So instead I’ll use search and search on glacier and find the asset that way. Once located checkout will lock this image in the dam for editing by anyone else and also download it and open it in Photoshop. To make the changes my comments requested, extend the background image size to 16 9 ratio and add more mountain bikers, I’ll first use the crop tool and define a 16 9 crop and pull out the edges and use generative fill to add more background. I’ll use the lasso tool to select an area and use generative fill adding the prompt mountain bikers in distance. Fantastic results. I’ll flatten this image and save it and check it back in to AEM. This will upload it back into AEM creating a new version. If you want to access the version information for any asset go to its detail view and click on the clock icon. This shows us any versions available for this asset. AEM is always managing the current version but this is where we can roll back to a previous version if we need to. I just got an email to create an advertisement for Instagram for the media kit if possible in the next five minutes. To do that I’m going to pick one of my hero group biking shots, duplicate it as a new asset, then crop that asset to Instagram specifications and make an advertisement using Adobe Express built in image editor. I’ll duplicate this as a new asset by going to the details page and choosing the scissors icon to access some Adobe Express editing options. One of them is convert to PNG which will allow me to save this as a new asset, duplicating it and allowing me to make massive edits on this new asset. With this image open in detail view I’ll go over to the pencil icon which shows me some editing options. One of them is crop and straighten. If you click on the crop and straighten tool it will reveal several different options, many of which are different social media sizes. So I’m going to scroll down to Instagram and choose the Instagram square version, position where I want it and then save this as a new version. My advertisement created on my new square group biking photo will of course need some call to action text and a logo. Typically I’d use Photoshop to manage these kinds of design tasks. Instead with the asset selected I’ll invoke open in Adobe Express and Adobe Express’s powerful editor will import this image into a new composition. Considering Adobe Express is its own powerful set of image editing tools and services, I’ll limit my edits to really adding some text on the image as well as adding one of the logos we have access to in the Platinum Tours media kit. With the editor open I’ll click the text tool icon and add text and it’s going to add a text block right on top of my image. I’ll edit the text the way I want it and choose some of these options to change the look and feel, maybe change the font, the color and add a shadow effect. To add the logo choose your stuff and then navigate to libraries and where it says logos, if you don’t already see the logo because it might have already been added to a library, you need to first add this logo to the library then you can add it into the image. So click the little plus icon next to the logos and then navigate and find the vector logo that you want to add to the library. Once it shows up in the library all you need to do is click on the logo thumbnail and Adobe Express will add it as a new layer in the composition. Here we can do some of those treatments like we did with the text, change the color, change the position and scale and whatnot. Basically make the composition the way you want it using these tools. Once you’re done with your awesome new advertisement composition choose either to save it as a new version or an entirely new asset. I’ll choose save as version since I designed that duplicate for this very purpose. Well there you go there’s a new advertisement created in under five minutes. If you ever need to download an image with an image selected in assets view you can click the download link at the top of the interface or choose download from one of the many options under the corner menu under the thumbnail. What I often prefer to do is to go into the details view and click on the renditions icon. This shows a series of renditions that were created when this asset was uploaded. Click on any of the renditions in the list to get a visual and with one of the renditions selected in the list you can choose download at the bottom of the interface or press the download icon next to its name in the list. But wait there’s more. There are more and different renditions to download and share available in the admin view, a different view into the dam. To switch views go to the profile icon in the upper right of the screen. Click and navigate down to switch views. This will switch the interface to the admin view. If you’re in assets view you’ll switch to the admin view and vice versa. Now in admin view let’s review the list of renditions on an asset. In admin view this renditions page displays a list of renditions broken up into different types. Static renditions are the same that we saw in the other view and are generated upon upload. Dynamic renditions and smart crops are shareable URLs to virtual renditions. With one of them selected click on the URL button at the bottom of the screen, copy and paste this URL into a new browser window. Dynamic and smart crop renditions are generated whenever a web page like this preview page requests it and take up no server space or storage footprint. Another kind of dynamic media type is an animated viewer like the built in zoom viewer when you first come to the renditions page. This source image is a high pixel count image and one way to see the image is to zoom into its details. This zoom viewer does this. Dynamic media has several other animated viewers depending on the asset type. Choose the viewers page to see some of them and each of these also offers a shareable URL by clicking on the URL button at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the download link button at the top of the interface with any asset selected brings up a list of download options. Using this interface we can download the original assets, any static renditions that were created, any smart crop renditions, and any dynamic media renditions. Select dynamic media ad hoc mode and use the interface to create a custom size and file format. Enabling all of these options can download many different renditions and variations of your assets. At the time of this recording, early 2024, there are two publishing options from this interface. If you select any assets or collections and choose publish to AEM, that is the same as publishing to dynamic media and will generate shareable URLs for any of those published assets. Publish to brand portal will publish assets to a connected brand portal endpoint. Brand portal allows for securely distributing approved creative assets to external parties and internal business users across devices. Choose anyone you provide access to this curated collection of published content. Choose quick publish to publish assets to dynamic media or brand portal. Choose manage publications for more granular options to both endpoints. I’ll switch to brand portal to show that user experience. Since brand portal is built on the AEM interface, it looks and acts similar to AEM, albeit with fewer controls than the full Adobe Experience Manager assets interface. Brand portal users can search on assets and download them as needed. Adobe Experience Manager assets, the enterprise DAM solution, is excellent at distributing assets, publishing assets to various endpoints like the brand portal and providing shareable URLs to various renditions. It’s also tightly integrated with AEM sites. Using this sample sites webpage, assets show up on the left rail in the asset selector. We can easily drag and drop any asset onto the site’s page. I’ll add this image to the site page by dragging it over to an editable zone on the page. Similarly, I’ll add a video which we added to our assets platinum folder and collection. For this, I’ll use a dynamic media component and then populate that component with the video. Using dynamic media components provides a variety of experiential options, including using any of the dynamic media renditions, any zoom viewer, as well as a viewer that will snap to any of the smart crop treatments when this page is resized. Resizing this page or viewport that houses the dynamic media component will choose from any of the smart crop renditions to display the image with the best width. Wide views show the widest smart crop and progressively narrower page widths. Choose thinner smart crop renditions. By now, after watching this comprehensive overview of Adobe Experience Manager assets, the industry leading digital asset management solution, you are an expert in many DAM functions, such as adding assets, downloading assets, and renditions, accessing and editing assets and shareable URLs, publishing assets, and using them in any CMS including sites. Thank you for your attention.