How to preserve asset creation date when uploading to Assets Cloud Service?

[valcohen]

I'm starting to play with my Cloud Service sandbox, starting with Assets as a Cloud Service. I uploaded a few folders of local images in JPG format to Assets, and when I look at the details in Assets, I see the Creation and Modified dates are the date & time I uploaded to Assets, not the information from the files. When I open the local files in Preview on a Mac, I see the creation date in the EXIF info (Date Time Original, Date Time Digitized), in the IPTC info (Date Created, Time Created, Digital Date Created, Digital Time Created) and in the TIFF info (Date Time). All of this is metadata in the file, not filesystem information, so it should be visible to AEM on import. 

I expected the default importer to pick up this metadata by default. Am I missing something, or do I need to customize some profile or workflow to specify the metadata I want to import?

EDIT:

Hm, I see the metadata from the file in Assets on the Advanced tab; the info from the file is displayed as "File created date". I guess this makes sense - "Creation Date" is when the AEM Asset was created by uploading the image file, and the image file's creation date is a separate property. So on to the next question: to use the "search-first approach" in assets, how do I search on the "File created date"? In the Filters UI, the Created Date seems to refer to the asset creation date -- not very useful to me - and Custom Filters has a list of 6 properties, none of which are the File create date.

If I uploaded photos of last Christmas today, I want to be able to search for photos from December 2022, even if they only appeared in AEM in 2023. This seems like a pretty common use case. How to get there?

[DPrakashRaj · Accepted solution]

You can customize the search filter facets as per your requirement and map the fields in search facets to the metadata property as needed.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/assets/admin/search....

[valcohen]

Thanks for the link, that should work (after I dig into the asset in CRX/DE to find out what the technical name of the property is). Hard to understand why this is not default behavior, and that every customer who needs it has to create a custom search facet -- and even then, searchers have to add it as a custom search property instead of using the builtin Created Date filter

Thanks for the docs though!

[DPrakashRaj]

Well, this is the customer specific requirement. All assets might not have created date in their metadata(not a mandatory field for assets) and that you might consider it as a default feature and I won’t says it’s a limitation as it allows you to customize the search facets according to your requirements 

[valcohen]

yes, of course -- it just seems like a very common use case, and it would be much friendlier if the system tried looking for this metadata and fell back to the AEM created date, rather than each customer having to set it up for themselves. But it is what it is, at least there's a way to get there.

[valcohen]

Ack, that doesn't appear to work in the new My Workspace UI

I'll work with my account manager to get some help with this.

[DPrakashRaj]

You might need admin permission to customize the search facets

[valcohen]

I don't think so -- it let me into the search forms editor, and let me customize the Assets Admin Search Rail with no complaints. The customization just doesn't show up in the new Assets UI. And when I switch back to the old UI, I don't get a search rail at all.

Thanks for trying though. Happy holidays!