About Amplience DAM

Amplience DAM is where your assets, including images and video are stored. It underpins the services of Dynamic Media, which includes powerful features for manipulating images and video, and acts as the library for assets used in Amplience CMS.

All of this is augmented by our CDN (Content Delivery Network) infrastructure.

This section gives an introduction to Amplience DAM, what it does and how to get started. For specific tasks, see Managing assets.

See Amplience DAM videos for video walk throughs for key features.

Amplience DAM main assets screen

Logging in to Amplience DAM takes you to the main assets screen, where you manage your assets.

At the top of the window is the toolbar for quick access to bulk actions, and settings for displaying assets. On the left are icons for four sections: Organise, Filters, Tools and Apps.

When the Organise or Filters sections are in focus, assets are shown in the main display area. Each asset is represented by an asset card, from which you can perform contextual actions.

Amplience DAM toolbar

The icons on the left of the toolbar allow bulk preview (1 in the image below), publish (2), unpublish (3) and delete (4) for up to 200 selected assets.

Bulk action icons in the toolbar are only enabled for actions available on your current selection.

Selecting assets for bulk actions

To select a range of assets, click the first one to select it and then shift-click on the last asset in the chosen range. All the assets in the range will be selected. You can then perform a bulk operation on these assets, such as publishing. See Selecting assets and selection modes.

From the toolbar you can also:

• Sort assets - sets the sort order, for example, date created or date updated
• Group locale siblings - displays assets in a localization together as a group. See Group locale siblings
• Page size - determines how many assets are displayed on a page
• Item size - controls the size of the asset cards
• Toggle selection mode - sets the default behavior for selecting assets. See Selecting assets
• Toggle transparency mode - sets whether transparency is displayed in cards and previews for image assets

Organise section

Use the Amplience DAM Organize section to search for and browse assets and see how they are grouped into asset stores and folders.

Asset stores are the top level 'buckets' within which assets are stored. Within asset stores, assets are organized into folders and subfolders. Only the asset stores that a user has permission to view will be displayed in this section.

From the Organize section you can:

1. Search for assets, using search criteria to refine the search results. From here you can also filter which asset types you want displayed.

2. Browse and organize assets using asset stores, folders, sub folders. Click on an asset store or folder to work with the assets assigned to it.

3. Filter which assets are shown. This section provides quick access for setting filters. Note, if you are using image recognition, filters are also shown for detected data types. See Image recognition.

Asset search

The search functionality within Amplience DAM allows you to build up powerful searches, including AND, OR and NOT, together with wildcards.

For example, the following search query: "hat AND stripe*", returns assets that either have names containing 'hat' or names containing any text starting with 'stripe'.

Note the search is performed for the selected asset store or folder, and its sub folders. To search all asset stores and their folders, select "All Assets".

For full information about how to define advanced searches, see the Searching for assets page.

Filters section

Use the Filters section to filter the displayed assets using various asset attributes. The filters are populated from the attributes of all the assets ingested into your account.

See how to filter assets.

Tools section

The Amplience DAM Tools section includes tools to help you manage tasks such as ingesting assets into your account and setting up video transcoding profiles.

Find out about each of these tools on the Tools page.

Apps section

The Apps section shows the apps that have been provisioned on your account. Not all apps are provisioned by default. When commencing a project, we will discuss with you the apps that will be required. If you are using Amplience CMS, you will log in via a separate URL instead of launching the app from Amplience DAM.

The Apps section in Amplience DAM is shown below.

Info

The Dynamic Media app available from the Amplience DAM Apps section enables you to perform administrative functions. This is separate from the Dynamic Media API that allows you to manipulate assets on the fly using their URL.

Depending on your role and permissions you can access the following apps:

• Point of interest app - For defining focal points and hotspots

• Dynamic Media app - For administrative functions, such as purging assets

• Account app - For administrators to view and edit information about virtual environments and whitelists

• Media share app - For sharing any media stored in Amplience DAM via a publicly accessible URL

• Product customization app - For administrators set basic workflow, allowing users to set a basic workflow status for assets, and to customize the appearance of Amplience for your organization. For example, the fonts and colors that are displayed

• Text Editor app - Enables you to create documents while you are working in Amplience DAM. You can create documents of the following types: JavaScript, JSON, XML, CSS,HTML and plain text

Amplience DAM Properties pane

Click the properties icon on an asset card to open the Properties pane, which has three tabs: Properties, Metadata and Version History.

Asset Properties tab

Shows asset attributes including name, label, published status, file size, width and height.

Published assets have a dynamic URL, a static url, or both, depending on its asset type. A url indicates an asset is published to the CDN and available from that URL. If a dynamic url is shown, the asset can be manipulated using Dynamic Media. Unpublished assets, show no URL.

Automatic image alt text

The "Alt Text" fields only apply if your system is configured for automatic alt text generation. You can update these fields once they've been populated with generated alt text. See Automatic alt text generation.

From the properties tab you can:

• Rename assets
• Publish assets
• Set workflow status

Asset Metadata tab

Displays generic metadata for an asset, together with any custom metadata you've added, such as product information. Point of Interest uses metadata to store hotspots and focal points.

Metadata improves search and filter results in Amplience DAM, and helps improve end user experience and automated processes. See Asset metadata.

Asset Version History tab

An audit trail of changes to an asset, showing when each change was made and letting you recover previous versions. See Asset version history.