At this point, you’ve read about the Asset Migration process and have defined the scope of the migration with your Customer Success Manager, and probably already spoken with your former DAM provider. Now, it’s time to dig deeper into the metadata topic. This article tells you how you should, ideally, prepare the metadata sheet for us.
Important note:
We need the metadata in a specific structure to be able to run a successful migration. After you’ve discussed the asset migration with your Customer Success Manager, you’ll receive a link to a template showing the following metadata possibilities. The first four pieces of this metadata information is mandatory, the rest of them are optional. The template can also be found here.
ID
Mandatory Unique ID of the Asset File. If there are no IDs available from the former system, you can use sequential numbers, letters, a checksum, or anything else which is unique to each asset to be imported
Example: 1, 2, 3, a, b, c, d9673f3128fcfbd70d040f7dc18afbd8
Filename
Mandatory name of the file. This filename will be stored in Frontify but is only shown in one very specific case (collections with licenses). The file name can not contain special characters or accents (allowed characters are a-zA-Z0-9._-). Any special characters will be ignored and the filename will be stripped of these characters. The filename must have the correct allowed extension appended to it.
Example: my_company_logo.jpg, Sound-file.mp4, 108765393.png
Location
Mandatory location of assets in the AWS S3 bucket folder. If you do a manual export, the easiest way is to have a flat list in the S3 bucket, to make the assets assignable to their location in the S3 bucket, via filename. The location can not contain special characters or accents (allowed characters are a-zA-Z0-9._-) and must be an exact match to the asset's location in the AWS S3 bucket folder.
Example: my_company_logo.jpg, Images/my_company_logo.jpg, 30000/310000/315/my_company_logo
Title
Mandatory title of the Asset. This title is displayed to the end-user (and is also the download name for the assets). If there is no title present in the metadata sheet, it will fall back to the filename without extension.
Example: Logo My Company Colored
Related_IDs
Unique ID(s) of the Asset(s) that the Asset should be related to (| separated values - imported relations are always bidirectional). So if, for example, asset ID #1 has a relation with asset ID #4, this relation will be displayed from both asset ID #1 and asset ID #4 (no need to set the relation in both assets). Relations with attachments are not possible.
Relations are being shown in the “relations” tab in the frontend.
Attached_to_ID
Unique ID of the parent Asset for the Attachment. If you have an attachment associated with an asset (e.g., you have a PDF of a publication, but want to have the original InDesign package attached as Attachment), you’d need to add the ID of the parent Asset in the line of the child asset.
In the Icon and Logo Library, attachments can be used for applying all different file formats of the icon or logo to the “main” icon/logo. For icons, the main icon should ideally be in an SVG file format.
Preview_parent_ID
The ID of the parent asset, for which this file should be set as a custom preview (e.g. for zip files). Only gif, jpg or pdf filetypes are allowed to be used as Previews. Only one value is permitted in the Preview_parent_ID field.
Please note that only the following fields are valid for Preview assets:
ID
Filename
Location
Title
Preview_parent_ID
All other fields will be ignored.
Directory
The folder structure in which the Asset will be located in the backend of your library. This does not influence how the assets are shown for the end-user, in the frontend. The folders are separated by a slash (/), so this structure Brand/Assets/Logo Mark would mean a subfolder Logo Mark within a subfolder Assets within the first level folder Brand.
Author
The name of the person that created the original Asset (this uploader is shown inMetadata information). This is not mandatory, but can be useful for keeping track of the original source of your Assets.
Description
Descriptive text of the asset content. Shown in metadata.
Tags
Here, you can add all your Keywords associated with the asset. Tags should be separated by a pipe (|). So, for example, “Brand Assets|Logo|Logo Mark|White” would create 4 tags (Brand Assets, Logo, Logo Mark, and White). If you’re choosing to import EXIF file information, the keywords associated with the file will be imported along with any tags defined in the CSV’s tags column.
Copyright
The Copyright status of the asset. This field only accepts the values “COPYRIGHTED”, “PUBLIC”, and “UNKNOWN”.
Copyright_notice
The Copyright Notice is a longtext field you can use for specific information about an asset’s copyright attribution.
Licenses
Names of the licenses to be applied to the asset (separated by pipe character "|"). For example, “External Distribution License|Other license” would create 2 Licenses (“External Distribution License” and “Other license”)
expires_at
You can define a date when an asset will expire (or has already expired). You can define in your Library if expired assets should automatically be removed from the frontend view of your Library. The valid format for the Expiry Date RFC3339_EXTENDED format. For example 2026-01-01T23:59:00+01:00 would represent the first of January 2026 at 11:59 PM in the UTC+1 timezone.
Custom Metadata
You can define multiple custom metadata fields that are shown in the metadata tab of the Media Library frontend. We have three different types of custom metadata that you can apply to your assets: TEXT, SELECT, DATE. More information about Custom Metadata in this Help Article. The fields need to have the following format:
In the header line: CustomMeta({"label": "Label Name", "type": "SELECT","multiple": true})
Label: Name of the metadata field
Type of metadata:
Text (text field)
Select (Predefined content from which the editor can choose from. Multiple option: true/false. Define false if you only want to allow one value to be selectable and true if you want to allow multiple values. This is the only type that accepts the multiple options)
Date (e.g., for a photoshoot date of images. Format: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss)
In the asset line: the actual value that should be applied to the asset (separated with the pipe | in case you select – multiple “true”).
Note: The correct " character (straight double quote mark) must be wrapped around all the options keys and values (except for the multiple values true/false that must remain unquoted). Different quote characters such as “ (curly double quote marks) or ‘ (single quote marks) may invalidate the CustomMeta header configuration and ignore the associated CustomMeta data.
More help articles about Asset Migration: