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Whether you are working with assets in the backend or with end-user material in the consumer view, you need simple ways of sharing your content with your team, end-users, and external viewers. Here’s a quick guide to making that process swift and simple.

The Projects is where you can work on assets and collaborate with other users. The Projects themselves are not connected to Guidelines or the consumer view of the Libraries. But this does not mean that the Projects have to be a black box.

You may want to quickly share the current state of an asset with an external agency or show an asset to someone without giving them access to the entire Project. This is where sharing options come into play.

When working on projects in the backend of your environment, you can share multiple assets with your team members by simply tagging them in a comment.

However, if you want to share a specific asset externally with, for example, partners or agencies, select the three dots on the lower corner of the asset in the workspace (the action fly-out), and click ‘Share’.

This will open a modal window that will give you two sharing options to choose from:

Let’s look at each, in turn, starting with the Share Tab. There are options for both internal sharing with other users, as well as external sharing with non-user viewers.

The internal sharing link allows you to share the asset with internal signed-in users that already have access to the brand. When the external sharing toggle is on, the asset can be viewed externally. This gives non-logged-in viewers the opportunity to view and download the asset (unless download protection has been activated). When the password requirement is toggled on, external users can only access the asset by entering the password, which is set up here. Finally, additional protection can be set up for the share link in the form of a validity date. The date set here will be the day upon which the share link will no longer be accessible.

The second tab is for Embedding. Here, you have the option to copy the unique code of your asset. This will allow you to embed the asset in e.g. a separate website or a wiki document. The CDN links any external to the individual asset.

Keep in mind that these embed tab capabilities only apply to individual assets, and not to assets in bulk.

You can utilize folders to share assets in bulk from the Project space. In the lower right corner of each folder card in the project, you can open the action fly-out by clicking on the three dots. Within this fly-out, click on ‘Share’.

The share fly-out will give you the option to share the assets in this folder (along with the assets in its subfolders) either internally to other users with access to the Project, or to optionally activate an external share link.

The external share link can optionally be given extra security by setting a password and/or selecting a validity date.

The Media, Logo, Icon, and Document libraries have similar sharing capabilities. You will also notice that they all have the same options as in the Projects section, regardless of the type of asset being shared.

Assets can be protected depending on the level of security you’d wish to give them. Asset protection settings are set up in the backend of the Media Library. The result of this for you as a frontend is that you might see:

When requesting to download an asset, you may also need to fill in a form to get approval for the download.

If specific assets have been protected on the backend by setting the Asset transformation options for users in the frontend, external viewers will receive a message that lets them know the asset is protected and therefore not automatically downloadable.

You can find detailed information on Download requests in this article.

Curated Collections can be shared directly from the Library backend by curators under the action menu of the Collection card. There, you can copy an internal share link or activate an external share link to provide access to the Collection to non-users.

For added protection of these external links, you can add a password and/or set an access validity date.

The curators can also manage whether or not frontend consumers can share curated Collections externally under the Collection settings menu.

Internal users of the frontend libraries can generate internal share links for both the curated and personal Collections. If the external share links have been activated for frontend users by curators, then they will also be able to generate a public share link for curated Collections.

Similar to how Collections can be shared from the Library backend, the same is true for folders in that Library. The share action can be found on the flyout of the folder itself, with the internal and external share link options. For added security, you can set up a password or validity date for the external share link.

When sharing assets, folders, and collections externally, the link recipient will enter the ‘External View’ to view the shared content. This is a simplified library view that only contains the shared content.

If only a single asset has been shared, then after passing eventual security checks such as password protection, the link recipient will see the asset in full-screen mode. Only the asset name, file type, and dimensions will be displayed along with the download button. If the asset is protected by copyright, the user must accept this before downloading. If the asset has download protection enforced, the user will not be able to download it from the external view.

If a collection is shared, the link recipient will see a scrollable overview of all assets in the collection. They also have the option to download either all assets at once or individually in detail asset view. In addition to the file name, file format, and dimensions, the viewer also sees the collection name and file size.

Finally, for folders, the link recipient will see an overview of all shared assets, similar to the external view of a collection.

Depending on who you want to share your guidelines with and how they might use them, you will want to share them with varying access rights. For this reason, you will find different levels of sharing options in the front end of your guidelines in the Power Bar, under the icon called Sharing.

This Teams tab will allow you to add users’ emails to share your Guidelines. These users must be signed in to view the Guidelines, so check that you have properly set up this process here: Inviting teams.

The Public Link tab allows you to share your Guidelines externally with optional Terms and Conditions and access rights restrictions. Use the tool to set up and manage access rights and conditions for particular target groups.

Read more about Public Sharing in this article

When you share your guidelines as a Public Link together with your Libraries, external viewers will be able to see your assets in the libraries.

Bear in mind that this doesn't apply if no libraries have been added to the front-end of your environment or if any target has been set up to block external viewers from seeing these libraries.

Guideline colors, Libraries videos, and imagery can all be transferred to personal Creative Cloud Libraries to make your workflow simpler. To set this up, enable the integration in the front-end of individual guidelines.

Once this has been enabled, users who are logged into the guideline will be able to integrate on-brand assets into their Adobe Creative Cloud. External viewers, such as external agencies or partners, will not have the option to see this in the front end.

For more on this integration, please refer to our Creative Cloud Libraries integration help article.

For both backend and frontend users of the Frontify environment, there are many options to share your valuable different assets with greater security and greater control over your unique brand. Use this guide to set up the right roles for your teams in the platform so they can set up appropriate sharing settings for their needs and the needs of your brand.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for further information.