> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.gradial.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Digital Asset Management > How Gradial handles asset governance at scale across every connected DAM — schema-aware tagging, workflow context, rights enforcement, and retrieval for every other job. ## The DAM Librarian A DAM Librarian's job is to make sure the right assets are findable, correctly described, properly governed, and reliably available to everyone who needs them — across campaigns, regions, brands, and teams. In practice that means ingesting and tagging thousands of assets from campaign shoots and agency deliveries, maintaining a metadata schema against a controlled vocabulary, managing rights records and expiry dates, auditing for duplicates, and ensuring that content and personalization teams can actually find and use what they need. A major campaign shoot can produce 600 assets. An agency delivery might arrive with inconsistent naming, missing metadata, and no campaign tags. Gradial is built for that pace — and for that job. *** ## What generic AI tagging misses Most enterprise DAMs now have built-in AI tagging — objects, scenes, colors, settings. These are useful for describing what's visually in an image. But the metadata that matters most for governance — campaign name, product association, regional restrictions, rights status, approval state, embargo date — is not visible in the image. It lives in the brief, the job ticket, and the rights contract. Generic AI tags what it can see. Gradial tags what actually governs the asset. *** ## How Gradial handles it **Schema-aware tagging.** Gradial is configured against your actual DAM metadata schema. Tags land in the right fields with the right controlled vocabulary values — not in a free-text pile that requires remediation. Assets come into the DAM correctly structured from day one. **Workflow-context tagging.** When assets are produced as part of a campaign managed in Workfront, Jira, or Wrike, the job ticket holds the governance metadata: campaign name and ID, product line, market, go-live date, and rights summary. Gradial reads that ticket and carries its context forward into DAM metadata automatically. Campaign and rights data travels with the asset from the moment of ingestion. **Rights and expiry governance.** Expired or rights-restricted assets being published carries real legal and financial exposure. Gradial's QA capabilities surface assets in the CMS that are flagged as expired or rights-restricted in the DAM — catching non-compliant assets before they go live. On the ingestion side, rights metadata is captured at the point the asset enters the system. **Bulk ingestion and remediation.** A major campaign delivery shouldn't require a week of manual data entry. Gradial handles bulk ingestion jobs — reading a batch of incoming assets, applying schema-aware tags, pulling workflow context, and populating required fields — so the librarian reviews exceptions rather than starting from scratch on every asset. The same applies to remediation: existing DAM libraries with incomplete metadata can be processed at scale. **Retrieval for every other job.** Asset work doesn't only happen when assets arrive. When another job needs an asset — a new page being built, a campaign email being assembled, a regional variant being localized — Gradial retrieves it: searching by the criteria that matter, confirming rights status, and handing the correct asset to the task. Assets that are correctly tagged are also correctly retrievable when needed. *** ## Where Gradial does this Asset work is native in each of the systems below — Gradial reads and writes them directly, using each platform's own metadata schema and controlled vocabularies. | System | What Gradial does there | | :- | :- | | **AEM Assets** | Full asset lifecycle — upload, folders, metadata, alt text, renditions, moves, publishing, and rights checks against content in the CMS | | **Sitecore Content Hub** | Asset search and discovery, entity and taxonomy tagging, uploads, and campaign asset association | | **Bynder** | Assets, metadata, collections, uploads, transformations, usage, automations, and tags | | **Aprimo** | Upload of Gradial-created assets and artifacts into the configured destination, with record verification | | **Box** | Browse, search, read, download, create folders, and upload — scoped to the folders a Box admin shares, and never able to delete | | **SharePoint** | Browse sites and libraries, read file metadata and managed-metadata tags, search, download, create folders, and upload | | **Google Drive** | Browse, search, read, download, create folders, and upload | | **Gradial ACI** | Content-addressed binaries managed alongside versioned content, in your own storage | Availability varies by plan, and not every system is enabled for every organization by default. Your Gradial team can confirm what's available to you. Semantic **Asset Search** — one searchable index with visual duplicate detection and brand-matched Asset Packs — currently indexes AEM Assets, Gradial ACI, Google Drive, and assets uploaded directly to Gradial. Every other system above is searched through its own connection. See [Asset Search](/docs/asset-management/asset-search). *** ## Roles this supports | Role | What Gradial handles | | :- | :- | | **DAM Librarian / Asset Manager** | Bulk ingestion, schema-aware tagging, taxonomy maintenance, duplicate detection, exception review instead of data entry | | **Brand / Rights Manager** | Rights and expiry metadata captured at ingestion, and flagged in the CMS before anything goes live | | **Content Producer / Web Producer** | Finding the right approved asset without a request to another team, and swapping assets while links and relationships hold | | **Campaign Manager** | Campaign and product metadata carried over from the job ticket, so assets arrive already associated with the campaign | | **Accessibility Lead** | Alt text generated and validated at scale across the library | | **Creative / Agency** | Deliveries ingested as they arrive, with naming and metadata normalized on the way in | ### How this maps to your function A single campaign shoot can produce 600 assets, and an agency delivery often arrives with inconsistent naming, missing metadata and no campaign tags. The work that follows isn't judgment — it's typing. Gradial takes the typing: it reads the batch, applies your real schema with your controlled vocabulary, pulls campaign and rights context from the job ticket, and leaves you a short list of exceptions to rule on. The governance decisions stay with you; the data entry doesn't. Most asset friction shows up downstream: you need an approved hero for a page going live tomorrow, and finding it means searching a library where the metadata is inconsistent, then checking whether the rights have expired. Gradial retrieves the asset as part of the job that needs it, confirms rights status before it's placed, and handles the swap across every page and reference when an asset is replaced. Publishing an expired or rights-restricted asset carries real exposure, and it usually happens because the rights record lives in the DAM while the risk lives on the page. Gradial connects the two: assets flagged as expired or restricted in the DAM are surfaced in the CMS before content goes live. Alt text is generated and validated across the whole library rather than sampled, which is what WCAG conformance actually requires. *** ## Key outcomes Assets enter the DAM with schema-compliant metadata on ingestion — no remediation queue. Campaign, product, rights, and regional metadata populated automatically from the job ticket. Expired and rights-restricted assets flagged before they reach the CMS. Bulk ingestion jobs that took days complete in hours. DAM Librarians shift from data entry to governance strategy. *** ## Reporting on your library Governance needs a view, not just a process. Ask Grady to build a **custom app** and you get a dashboard reading straight from your connected DAM — which assets in a delivery failed QA, what's missing alt text, what's approaching a rights expiry, grouped however your team thinks about it. Because it queries the DAM on refresh, it reflects the library as it stands rather than a snapshot someone exported. The same applies to intake: a custom form gives requesting teams a structured way to submit asset and metadata requests, with submissions attributed and queued for Grady to work through. See [Custom Apps](/docs/insights/custom-apps). *** *For step-by-step instructions on uploading assets, updating alt-text, managing metadata, and swapping assets, see [Asset Operations](/docs/asset-management/asset-operations).* This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.