What are the best practices for associating images used inside a pdf in aem assets?

[sogden]

Hello fellow AEM Asset users,

We would like to associate a source image(s) that were used in multiple pdf files.  We would like to avoid duplicating the source file in separate sub-folders for which the images was used in the multiple pdfs.  Please advise AEM Assets best practices in doing so, that would allow a user to navigate quickley to the associated assets used in a pdf.  Additionally if edits were made to the pdf, how to keep up with these relationships automatically.

Thank you.

Suzanne

[David_Fischer92 · Accepted solution]

I would recommend using the Relate functionality within AEM where you can link assets together.  In this instance you can mark the one image regardless of where it lives as the Source asset and the others as the derived assets.  When you go into the asset properties you'll be able to directly click on a link to that source or derived assets. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-65/content/assets/managing/related-ass....

Unless the image in the PDF is referencing a dynamic media URL for the image (or some other type of asset CDN) rather than using the actual binary file I don't know of way to update that automatically in the derived assets.

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Depending if those files were made with InDesign - you can upload the InDesign file and the referenceResolver will list all images that are within this InDesign file, as long as they are also in AEM Assets, within the dependencies tab (within properties). In addition, you could alwas use the manual process of relating files with one another, but this is a lot of work depending on how many images you have in these PDFs.
The InDesign file on the other hand is able to do that in an instance - and updates its dependencies as well when an asset expires or moves to a different folder.

[diksha_mishra]

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