Decide your asset approach
When content is discussed, everyone often imagines just text. However, most content would be far from effective without a proper visual segment. Images and videos as well as other downloadable files are vital in presenting information online. Together, they represent your assets.
Table of contents
Key points
- Content isn't just text but also assets – images, videos, downloadable files. Think up a way of asset management that will be comfortable for your users.
- With Kontent.ai, you can use a built-in asset library with or without advanced asset management, or external digital asset management systems (DAMs). In all these cases, assets can be accompanied by metadata.
- Apply image transformation to avoid adjusting images for different devices manually.
Choose your preferred approach
Kontent.ai offers three approaches to your asset library. You can also combine them if necessary.
A) Built-in asset library
If you don't have any dedicated platform to manage your images or files, you can conveniently store them directly in the built-in library. In the library, you can use folders to keep your files organized. All files contain a title and a description in each language by default. Thanks to content modeling of assets, this is further extendable based on your needs.
Using the built-in asset library is a good way to go or at least start as migrating your assets elsewhere later is always an option with Kontent.ai.
B) Advanced asset management in Kontent.ai
Advanced asset management combines the best of both worlds, the built-in asset library with advanced capabilities for organizing your assets. This can be a great option if you prefer to keep your assets stored directly in Kontent.ai but require a more complex solution for your projects. Each file will be extended by asset taxonomy so that you can tag it based on your team, region, asset usage, license, and so on.
By using asset taxonomies, you can simplify your asset categorization while also making it easier for your content creators to find the right assets.
On top of that, advanced asset management comes with image customization directly in the Kontent.ai UI. Your content creators can adjust images to fit the content limitations without the need of a graphic expert.
C) External digital asset management (DAM)
If you prefer to keep your assets elsewhere, you can use any service suitable for this task with an API. That's typically a digital asset management (DAM) system, such as Bynder or Flicker.
To interconnect your DAM and Kontent.ai, one of the options is using a custom element. You can create a picker with Bynder gallery thumbnails or with a filter. The limits of the integration are only in the DAM's API. See the integrations topic on GitHub and the custom elements overview to find custom elements you can use or customize for your scenario.
Content creators can then search for the assets stored in the DAM directly from content editing, without leaving Kontent.ai and losing time switching between applications.
Model your assets when modeling content
Adding an asset to your content may be enough for some use cases. Often, though, you want your assets to contain other metadata like tags or alternative texts. That can be done for assets from both the asset library and DAM.
Advanced asset management to the rescue
If you're after an image categorization, advanced asset management in the asset library might be the right choice for you. Add taxonomy to your asset type and use it to tag the assets in Kontent.ai. This way, you can achieve better asset governance while also avoiding duplicate files and quickly sorting out any uncategorized assets. With a well-defined taxonomy, your content creators will be able to quickly find the relevant assets for their use case.
In need of complex asset metadata
On top of organizing your assets, you might need even more specific metadata included in your files, such as contribution or expiration date (for specific usage rights). So how can you do this within Kontent.ai?
One of the recommendations that will be mentioned during content modeling is to create a specific content type for assets, which will provide all the information that belongs to that asset.
By modeling the assets, you'll open the door to the scenarios such as:
- Clickable images – Create a content type that will include an image and a URL.
- Presentation and layout options – Add a multiple-choice element so that your editors can choose how the image will be presented on the front end. Let them define its size, emphasis, or whatever they'll need.
Optimizing images for different devices
If you display content on different devices, typically desktop and mobile, you can use the image transformation features. These are part of the Delivery API and can do quite some magic for you.
When displaying an image, you can apply different transformations to every image. Without having multiple versions of the image stored, you can have multiple versions of it delivered instead.
For example, you have the promo.png image stored in HD quality. In many CMSs, you'd need to create promo_small.png and promo_mobile.png to display different resolutions elsewhere. This would eventually clutter your asset library. It's also difficult when you want to update such an image. With Kontent.ai, you can use the image transformation and resize or trim the image based on the device within your code automatically.
You can also integrate a custom element for editing assets directly when you're editing content. This enables content creators to modify the assets for their use case at the time.