Asset Bank can extract and use data embedded in images using the following formats: EXIF, IPTC, XMP.

When an image is added to Asset Bank through the 'Single Upload' page, Asset Bank will have a look to see if any of its own attribute fields have mappings set up for any of the embedded data types. If so, for each attribute that has a mapping (see below for how to add mappings) Asset Bank will look in the image to see if the relevant EXIF/IPTC/XMP field has a value. If it does Asset Bank grabs the value of that field and uses it to populate its own attribute field for which the mapping has been set up. The user will then see those values pre-populated on the next step of the process, i.e. where the user enters values for all the asset attributes (they are therefore free to change the values of the pre-populated attributes if they wish).

A similar process happens when images are added through the bulk upload process, i.e. the asset attributes for an image are populated according to the mappings.

As an example of this, Asset Bank comes with one pre-configured mapping in place: the EXIF.DataTimeDigitized field is mapped to an Asset Bank attribute called 'Date Created' (which is of type 'Date'). This means that if you upload an image that contains a value for the EXIF field 'DataTimeDigitized' (which it is likely to if the image was created by a modern digital camera) then Asset Bank's 'Date Created' field will be pre-populated with the date the picture was taken.

To change the 'Embedded Data Mappings', or to create new ones, log in as an admin user and go to Admin >Attributes and then click on the tab 'Embedded Data Mappings'. 

If you want to make multiple IPTC/EXIF/XMP fields searchable without having corresponding attributes for each within Asset Bank then you could take this approach:

• Create an attribute in Asset Bank with a label something like ‘Embedded Data‘. Make sure this is set to be ‘keyword searchable‘.
• Set up as many ‘embedded data mappings‘ as you want, all going to this same field. Remember to set a delimiter character (e.g. a space) to separate the values coming from different fields.

The result of this will be a many to one mapping, i.e. from many IPTC/EXIF/XMP fields to your one Asset Bank attribute, the result being that your Asset Bank attribute will be populated with a chunk of text made up of the values of all the fields you mapped, i.e. they will all be keyword searchable.