Understanding Megaproperties And Best Practices

Summary

What is a megaproperty? Megaproperties are metaproperties with 10,000 or more metaproperty options attached to a single metaproperty. When a metaproperty becomes a a megaproperty users can face performance issues if they have not built their portal to be well-equipped for such data heavy assets. This article serves as a best practices guide to assist users with megaproperties and scale. 

Who?

This feature/solution is enabled by a Bynder Admin.

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Users will need the Manage metaproperties and Manage metaproperty options permissions to work with metaproperties/megaproperties and their metaproperty options. 

Why?

Bynder understands the need to use large-scale metaproperties to efficiently manage the assets within the DAM. These best practices help safeguard performance across filtering, tagging, integrations, and overall system responsiveness.  Bynder is designed to support a wide range of data volumes; however, adhering to these practices helps ensure consistently fast performance when retrieving, filtering, or tagging with metaproperties, especially at scale.

Best Practices

Taxonomy Clean-Up

Often portals with megaproperty issues need a taxonomy clean-up, namely in cleaning us non-used options. These are metaproperty options that have been configured in the portal, but do not have any assets attached. Bynder recommends removing unnecessary metaproperty options for ease of use. 

Contact your Customer Success Contact to assist in non-used options clean-up for options that:

  • Have been made over 12 months ago without being used.
  • Have no assets for the last 12 months.
  • Options that should be deprecated due to non-use, lack of current relevance. 

Use Text-Type Metaproperties

One way to optimize your taxonomy for megaproperties is by using the text type. Example use cases for the text-type metaproperties are: preserving legacy information during migrations, storing large amounts of text (2,500 character limitation), creating clickable external links in an asset, managing a growing product portfolio, and automatically populating information based on another metaproperty.

This option is much lighter for the system to process and is ideal when you have:

  • Information that is not pre-defined
  • Data that varies at the asset level
  • Automatically generated values based on an asset attribute or another metaproperty

When making use of text metaproperties, please take into account:

  • A Text metaproperty cannot be changed into a Single or Multiselect metaproperty type
  • The full list of values in the Text Type Metaproperty can’t be retrieved via API. It can only be accessed at the asset level.
  • They can’t be used in Smart filters
  • There is no unique reference for text metaproperty. The values can be duplicated across assets.
  • Text type does not maintain a controlled list of metadata, therefore users can add any information.

Enforce Structural Character Constraints

When creating or editing metadata attributes, ensure your data complies with the following hard system limits:

  • Metaproperty Options (Select/Multi-select labels): Standard text fields for option labels are typically capped at 255 characters. For specific automated capabilities, such as AI-powered facial recognition (which generates option lists for recognized names), the limit is explicitly 150 characters.

  • External Reference Fields: This internal identifier field inside a metaproperty option allows a maximum of 255 characters.

  • Asset Titles: The core asset title field is capped at a maximum of 400 characters.

  • Embedded Metadata: During asset import, any incoming embedded metadata (such as XMP, IPTC, or EXIF tags) is strictly limited to 1,000 characters per metafield.

  • Text metaproperties: Free-form inputs are up to a strict limit of 2,500 characters.

Use Autocomplete On Single Or Multi Select Type Metaproperties

The ideal way to set up Single/Multi Select megaproperties is enabling the autocomplete setting. Instead of displaying a static list with a large amount of data for the user to scroll through, an autocomplete search box will appear during the upload process, enabling the user to look for specific options.

This process is the fastest way to deal with large-scale data, as this drastically reduces the amount of information on demand and improves the user experience.

Use Autocomplete On Smartfilters For Megaproperties

The ideal way to set up a smart filter for a megaproperty is by using the autocomplete smartfilter type. This is an effective approach for handling large amounts of data, as a static list would display an overwhelming amount of options at once, making it heavy for the system to process and difficult for users to navigate.

Bynder recommends using autocompleted smartfilters for any metaproperty with more than 1,000 options.

Optimize Megaproperty Option API Fetches

Building integrations that fetch both metaproperties and metaproperty options from the same endpoint can lead to performance issues and potential failures in the integration. Using the separate options endpoint ensures a stable and efficient integration design. The endpoint is:

/api/v4/metaproperties/{metaproperty_id}/options

Note: By default, the /api/v4/metaproperties endpoint includes all metaproperties, with all their options, which can lead to inefficiencies. We recommend always specifying ?options=0 when calling this endpoint to exclude options:

/api/v4/metaproperties?options=0

This API endpoint is being deprecated, as we move towards more efficient endpoints for Bynder users. We do not recommend using this endpoint.

Related Articles

How To Create Metaproperties

How To Create Metaproperty Options

How To Add Metaproperties To A Smartfilter

Level: Proficient

Proficient-level articles are for users who have some prior Bynder knowledge. These articles require you to know the basics and may also require higher-level portal rights to accomplish the task outlined within the article. 

 

 

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