Finding where an asset is referenced

Sometimes you will need to remove an asset from your website if it is outdated, it refers to a policy that has changed or it may refer to a person who is no longer with your school. This requires you to remove references to the asset before you can unpublish and delete it.

What is a reference?

A reference in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is the term for any pages on your website that are linking to an asset. AEM has an automatic check for references when you attempt to unpublish or delete an asset. The aim of of this is to avoid having broken links.

How do I find references?

You can use the properties of an asset to find the references. In the properties you have a panel called references that will show any location on your website that is linking to the asset in question. You can open these links in a new browser window and then find/remove the links and publish the page.

Once this is done, you can then unpublish and remove the asset.

Steps to open properties

• Navigate to the asset in question
• Select this asset by ticking the icon beside it
• Now select properties from the toolbar at the top of the screen or press the letter P on your keyboard
• When the properties open, select the references tab as shown in the image above references tab as shown in the image above.

Now you can open each reference in a new tab to work on each particular page. Once you have removed the references, come back to the references panel on the asset properties and refresh this page. Keep doing this until there are no more references.

Then you will be able to unpublish and delete your asset.