AEM Essentials: Key words vs. Tags

[CynthiaCo]

Hello Adobe Community. We've recently imported all of our photo assets into our Essentials DAM, within a taxonomy folder structure. Is there any guidance available on tagging versus keywords? It's a much more time-consuming process to tag an image within a multi-level taxonomy than adding keywords. It seems that both tags, smart tags, and key words are all utilized in an asset search. How are others in the community differentiating between the two and are there any caveats for using one more than the other?

[Imran__Khan · Accepted solution]

@CynthiaCo 
Tags: Tagging an asset allows you to categorize it within a taxonomy hierarchy. This is a manual process and it's useful for maintaining a controlled vocabulary and organizing assets within a predefined structure. If you have a large number of assets that need to be tagged, you can use bulk editing features to apply tags to multiple assets at once.

Keywords: These are typically added during the uploading process and can be automatically generated from the metadata of the asset file. Keywords are more flexible and can be anything that describes the asset. They are useful for search and can often be more descriptive than tags.

In short, use tags for their taxonomy structure and keywords for additional descriptive information.

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Hi @CynthiaCo ,

Tags are to it's core a great functionality when you have a clear cut structure, while keywords can include everything, even typos. Tags are very helpful for creating smart collections and also will be auto translated into many languages /or you can edit the translation manualy. Keywords on the other hand are not restriced, and people can chose to write in here whatever they want, (even typos :D) they do not benefit from the translation (as far as i am aware, please do correct me somebody if i am wrong about this).
The autotranslation is not perfect and needs to be checked ;D
My favorite example here was the tag bodyparts:arms - which was translated to german körperteile:waffen (bodybarts:weapons)
The tags are great for filtering search results.
The keywords are great for boosting assets within search results.

I see it like this: 
Tags = Core functionality 
Keywords = nice to have

To reduce the work to get tags into our assets, this is what i did.
Even before AEM was on the menu, i changed the quality and datastandards of my company to get as much information as possible into the filename.
That made the filename very cryptic, but helped me then later to use the filename to attach tags to those assets.
To give an example:
Product pictures: 
(Product-name)-(color)-(Abr. image type/perspective)-(motive)-(numeration in case of a picture series)-(original image number)-(version).tif
Print media documents:
(Art.Nr)-(Abr. Dokument type )-(WxH in mm)-(Department)-(Title Name)-(additional info)-(country of distribution)-(Version)

This was distributed to all our media agencies and photographers including a list of all valid abbrevations.

When the files then went into the AEM Assets, i exported a csv of all the assets and with the help of excel power query build this function that (including many other things) checks the assetpath and the filename within for those abbrevations - then adds them into the cq:tags column with a pipe separator.

This way i could attach a loooooooooot of tags to the existing assets without creating a manual task out of it.

I hope this helped a bit ;D

Have a great week!

[EstebanBustamante]

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