We did a podcast about the CSV Asset Importer in which we talked about the usefulness of this tool. Here is a written breakdown of that podcast for this specific ACS Adobe Experience Manager Tool. Remember, these should only be used in your non-production lanes.
What is it?
From the ACS GitHub page about CSV Asset Importer: “CSV Asset Importer is a tool that accepts a CSV file whose rows represent an Asset to import.”
How it works
When you need to do that initial import of a bunch of Assets for your development work, no one wants to sit there and upload them manually; even creating the correct JCR package structure can be a bit of a pain, especially if you want to import specific items of asset metadata. Thankfully, the ACS guys have created a great tool that allows you to define the list of assets to be imported, their on-disk location and where in the DAM they should end up, as well as their associated metadata, all in a single CSV file. Adobe Experience Manager will then do the hard work of importing the asset, applying the metadata, and executing the required workflows.
Example application
Again, like most of the other ACS AEM Tools, it pretty much just does what it says. We have used it on several projects to import a large batch of assets rather than manually uploading them. If you’re preparing to load a long list of assets into your Adobe Experience Manager instance, this is a very handy way to control the ingestion process. Please pay special attention to the “Important Considerations” mentioned in the documentation.