The most professional and effective first step is to clarify intent with the client. Automatically converting colors without consultation can lead to inaccurate brand representation. Starting with a conversation ensures you are working with the correct source values and builds a collaborative relationship, which is a core principle of asset management.

In AEM, assets and their renditions must be replicated from the author to the publish instance(s) to be publicly available. If the publish instance runs out of disk space, replication agents will fail, resulting in assets being missing on the public site despite being correct on author. This is a common infrastructure issue that directly causes failed downloads.

Simply deleting or unpublishing assets would break all page references. The best practice is to move the assets to a secure location (unpublishing them) and then leverage AEM’s reference management. A workflow can be triggered to notify page owners or even automatically replace the image with a compliant placeholder, managing compliance while maintaining site integrity.

The Date/Time field type is designed for this purpose. Setting granularity to ‘date’ removes the time component. Storing the date in a standardized ISO format (yyyy-mm-dd) ensures reliable sorting and filtering in search queries, enabling functionalities like date-range searches which are crucial for the requested ‘Q3 2024’ filter.

Smart Crop in AEM Assets can be enhanced with custom, trained models. By providing examples of successful crops (training data), you teach the AI the specific patterns of your brand’s imagery, such as keeping logos in frame. This addresses the root cause for similar future assets and scales much better than global adjustments or manual work.

The AEM Assets HTTP API is the core interface for programmatically creating, reading, updating, and deleting assets. An external system can invoke this API (e.g., via a webhook triggered by an approval event) to push assets into AEM. This creates a clear, one-way integration flow from the external ‘source of truth’ into AEM.

AEM’s ‘Share Link’ (formerly ‘Asset Share’) feature is purpose-built for secure external collaboration. You can create a share link for a specific folder, grant upload (contribute) permissions, set an expiration date and password, and share only that link. This gives the freelancers zero access to the main AEM interface, meeting the security requirement perfectly.

The ‘DAM Update Asset’ workflow processes the original, often very large, binary. For a high-res TIFF, generating a small JPEG rendition involves decoding the massive file. Creating an optimized intermediate (e.g., a max-width JPEG copy) first means subsequent rendition steps work on a much smaller file, drastically speeding up the overall workflow while the final output quality remains defined by the rendition steps.

In AEM’s query syntax (based on JCR/SQL-2), the asterisk (*) is a wildcard. ‘NOT usageRights:*’ finds assets where the `usageRights` property does not exist (is null). Combining this with `usageRights:expired` using the OR operator correctly returns assets that are either explicitly expired or have no rights data at all, which is often treated as a compliance risk.

The most professional and effective first step is to clarify intent with the client. Automatically converting colors without consultation can lead to inaccurate brand representation. Starting with a conversation ensures you are working with the correct source values and builds a collaborative relationship, which is a core principle of asset management.0