Managing Assets Essentials

Transcript

In this video, we explore the basics of managing assets in Assets Essentials. Assets Essentials provides a quick and easy way to store and manage your assets in an accessible collaborative environment, providing access to your assets across Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud applications and beyond.

Assets Essentials content architecture is folder based, much like AM assets, or even how files are organized on your own computer.

It’s important to define a thoughtful folder architecture that models how your business uses its assets. In this example, we have several brands within our organization using Assets Essentials. So it’s natural to make the top level folders mapped to those brands.

Here in the Weekend Brand folder, we’ve decided to further organize by logos, which are reusable brand assets that anybody working on the Weekend Brand may need. And then by marketing collateral that supports the Weekend Adventures, which are effectively the Weekend Brand’s product.

In the Adventures folder, each adventure has its own folder, containing assets pertaining specifically to that adventure.

New folders can be created by selecting Create Folder in the top right.

And there we go, we have a new folder.

Uploading assets is just as easy. We actually have a few options for this. One option is we can select the Add Assets from the top, and from here we can either drag and drop files and folders from our local computer to cue them for upload, or we can use the computer’s native file selector to locate assets to upload.

Once we’ve selected all the files and folders from our computer we want to upload, select Upload, and the files begin uploading in the background.

The Uploads View gives us insight into the upload, and if there are any problems that require our attention. Depending on the size and quantity of assets, this may take some time to upload and process.

Similarly, we can drag files and folders from our local computer directly into the main area of Assets Essentials to kick off the asset upload process.

Note that when you upload a folder it can also contain sub folders which in turn contain other sub folders and assets. And this can be a great way to quickly create a folder architecture without having to go up to the Create Folder and create each folder by hand.

Now that we’ve created some folders and uploaded assets, let’s take a look at some of the operations Assets Essentials provides for both assets and folders.

Operations are available via the ellipsis on an item, or when it’s selected, an action bar displays across the top containing the operations. Let’s try out a couple operations really quick. We can rename an asset or folder, so select the item to rename and enter a new name.

Next, let’s try out Move.

Here, we can see that the Cycling Tuscany folder was incorrectly placed in the Whistler Mountain Biking folder. So let’s move the Cycling Tuscany folder down into our Weekend Adventures Folder. Simply select Item Move, select Move, and then set the Adventure Folder to be the new Parent Folder.

Alternatively, if you prefer to move assets through dragging and dropping, you can also drag and drop assets into the folder tree in the left navigation.

Similarly, we can copy assets to different folders using the copy operation. Note that this will create a duplicate of the asset, requiring it to be managed in two different places. Later in this video, we’ll take a look at how Collections can be used to handle common copy use cases without duplicating the asset itself.

And of course, we can delete folders and assets as well.

Let me delete a few of these images And as expected, after deletion they no longer show up in the folder. However, if we open the trash and take a look, we can see that these newly deleted items are listed here.

We can use the trash to restore deleted items, by selecting them and selecting Restore.

Restoring puts the item back in the same place it was deleted from.

We can also permanently delete an item from the trash by selecting it and selecting delete.

Items deleted from the trash are completely removed from Assets Essentials.

Lastly, let’s take a look at Collections. Based on the concept of folders, it makes sense that if we have an asset, it can only exist in a single folder at a time. We can of course make a copy of it into another folder but now we’d have two assets that we have to maintain in parallel, which isn’t a great idea.

This is where Collections can really shine. They allow for the organization of assets in a way that breaks out of the traditional folder-based model. With Collections, you can define as many groupings as you want and include assets across Assets Essentials, and we can even have the same asset in many Collections. An easy way to think about Collections is that they’re just a list of asset references, and these references can point to assets anywhere in Assets Essentials.

To see how this works, let’s first head over to Collections and we need to make sure we have a Collection to associate assets with.

Since we don’t have one yet, let’s go ahead and create a new one that will contain assets about bicycles.

When creating a Collection, we can specify if the Collection’s public or private. Public Collection is visible to all Assets Essentials users in our organization. While private Collections are visible only to you and Assets Essentials administrators. With the Collection created, we can now add either assets or folders to it. So let’s find some assets that are about bicycling. We can add them either directly from the Collections view.

Or from browse.

Or even from search.

Okay, now we can quickly access this curated set of assets about bicycling by going to Collections and selecting the Collection. And here we go. And all the assets, which live in a variety of holders across Assets Essentials are now nicely and readily available right here.

So what we just looked at was a manually curated Collection, meaning we manually went in and selected the assets and folders that should be part of this Collection. While this works well for some use cases, it’s often nice to be able to create dynamic Collections whose content is determined by some search criteria. This way, as new assets are added to Assets Essentials, they automatically become candidates to show up in the Collections without requiring manual intervention. In Assets Essentials, we call these Smart Collections.

To create a Smart Collection we use Assets Essentials Search. Simply create a search that defines the criteria for the assets to be included in the Collection. And let’s make a Collection of all the high res Weekend Adventure images so we can select all adventure images with a minimum width.

And since this is just an Assets Essentials search, we even have a nice preview of the results as we change our Smart Collection criteria.

Once satisfied, select Save at the bottom, and then Smart Collection. Give it a name just like before. And we also get to specify if the Smart Collection is public or private.

We can head over to Collections, select our new Collection, and there we go. Now we have easy access to all our high res Weekend Adventure images.

If new Weekend Adventure hi res images are added to Assets Essentials, and let me add a couple more real quick just to show you, when we go back to the Smart Collection the ones that meet the Smart Collection criteria automatically are included.

We can, of course always edit a Smart Collection to evolve it as we see fit.

All right, you should now know how to add and manage your assets in Adobe Assets Essentials. Thanks for watching. -