Metadata Schema Tips
I have been tasked with creating a new custom metadata schema and I was hoping to get some insight on how others might be tackling the problem.
What we currently have is several dropdown menus that have associations between one another for various products and their accessories/sub-categories. That seems to work well for us but it starts to break down when we are adding our SKUs numbers. We have well over a thousand SKUs and adding them to an associated dropdown menu is both tedious to manage and tedious to use. The original reason for doing it this way was to be able to do a specific product SKU search in the filter rail but I can't help but think there is a much better way to tag product photo assets with multiple SKUs and still have them filterable.
So my questions are:
How do others handle a similar situation so that their assets can be easily filterable (product>sub-category>SKUs)
Is there a way to filter by a specific set of tags? Does that even make sense to have as an option?
I am VERY new to this and have been tossed into this trial by fire so any pointers as to how to dig up this info or links to specific guides would be very helpful and appreciated! Im new enough that I'm not quite sure what terms to be searching for so my search results are all over the place and largely unhelpful.
Also, as I'm so new I'm having difficulty even finding a starting point to learn AEM in a way my company needs. If anyone has any tips on where to start learning AEM from a DAM perspective with a focus on product photography/multimedia that would be lovely.

