content fragment with assets(images, files)

Have you looked at Content Services?

That's in my plan for next step, create services to make the CF available for different targets for consumption. I thoughts that will be relatively easier after the CF and structures are well defined. Currently I'm focusing defining the CF structure at authoring. We have multiple hierarchical levels of CF models, with fragment elements of rich text, images, files...

See this Ask the AEM Community Experts playback. It may help you -- Scott's Digital Community: Ask the AEM Community Experts for March 2018: AEM Content as a Service: What, Why, and How?

Thanks for the pointer!

I went thru CF FAQ sample before. This video has more helpful info. It used Content Reference for images. I knew this option and tried to find some other ways. Our assets/images are part of the CF. Having authors to load assets separately from CF is really cumbersome. It will do for our small set of CFs. it will make CF authoring unbearable for large amount of assets. I don't see why asset/image data type is not in CF.

You can use the content fragment models by installing a feature pack and expose assets to the public and consume it in external apps and SPAs. In 6.4, this is an OOTB feature

(1) : Content Fragment Models

I'm not worried much about consuming OOTB CF data as long as the data have predictable predefined structured in JCR, which they are under /content/dam. I know that assets can be referenced from CF by defining a Content Reference field. However our assets are integral part of CFs. Storing assets outside of the other CF data have many disadvantages.

What I'd like to have is to be able to insert assets directly into CF. The benefits:

1. optimized authoring experiences. authors can directly upload images/files into CF. It's more efficient than load assets separately, nav to CF, click an icon and find the asset.

2. Update/delete to CF will directly apply the assets, assuming they are stored under the same node with other CF fields. Again, authors do not to need to manipulate them separately.

I can see that many CF use cases would prefer to store the assets within CF. I've used other WCMs before where every piece of content requires a CF template, good or bad. The asset field gives you options to 1) link to an existing internal asset 2) link to an external asset 3) load the asset directly.

my 2 cents : I understand what you are trying to do here but don't think it is possible OOTB. IMO concept of  CF relies on the content structure which inturn relies on the referenced content(asset, text etc.) which later can be consumed internally or externally where all these assets reside at a central location for easy management but don't think you can directly put assets to the CF for now

Thanks!

If using AEM for asset management, it makes sense to store them in DAM. For wcm development the focus is to assist stand up pages, it's helpful to have images as part of Richtext/CF logically so they can be managed together. Regardless where the images are physically stashed under.

Is it possible to customize OOB Data Type by adding/overlay image or file-upload?

images can loaded like an image component.

There is no official documentation or steps released to do this.

But you can try to look at OOTB one and do it. I don't think it will be straight forward.