1/ You can find out where an image was taken by clicking ‘View on map’

If the GIS module is configured in Asset Bank, you will see a ‘View on map’ link next to each asset that has location information stored within it. This information is typically extracted from the embedded metadata in the file at point of upload (assuming it was taken with a camera that records GPS information). See Fig. 1. below.

If this information is not within the images you have, then you can edit your assets and add it in using Google maps (you point to a location and Google returns co-ordinates back into the relevant Asset Bank attributes).

2/ You can search for assets within a geographical area

3/ You can ‘Find nearby items’

Summary

If you have assets with GPS information stored within them, then you can now configure Asset Bank to make use of this. It allows you to view an assets location on a map, search over a geographical area to locate assets, or find other items that are physically near to the asset you are currently looking at.

• Instructions for configuring GIS in Asset Bank

Please contact the support team should you have any questions or need help configuring this option.

We hope this list has been useful. If you have any feedback or questions then please get in touch: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk.

Every image I upload is tagged with the relevant country it was taken in, however around half of our users are only interested in viewing assets related to specific continents (e.g. Africa). Is there a way to present this information in categories so that every image appears both in its country specific folder (e.g. Ethiopia), plus the level above this (e.g. Africa)?

Assets can be in multiple categories

When you upload an asset into Asset Bank you can already choose for it to reside in multiple locations within the category structure. See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Here we have added an asset into both 'Images' and 'Logos' folders.

So the client could create an Africa folder with an Ethiopia sub-folder and then just ensure that every asset is put into both locations. However, this does add a small burden as the uploader would always have to remember to do this. This could start off fine, but later when more people are given upload rights or when key staff change this could cause issues.

Automatically showing assets in their descendant categories

Another way to achieve the same result is to configure Asset Bank to always show assets in their descendant categories. That is, if I upload an asset into the Ethiopia sub-folder, then it will also automatically be displayed in the parent ‘Africa’ folder.

Here is what browsing into the ‘Africa’ category would look like before and after I make this configuration change (Fig. 2 & 3 below).

BEFORE:

Fig. 2. Browsing into the Africa folder before making the config change

AFTER:

Fig. 3. After the change, assets now automatically show in the parent category too

Now if a user is interested just in images of Africa, they can browse into the relevant category and see everything that exists there. If the user is interested in a specific country in Africa, then they can click into one of the sub-folders to see only these assets.

This configuration option effectively changes the category structure from a potentially sparse tree with all assets generally appearing in leaf nodes, to one that is a filter based structure, showing the user all of the assets at the top level, but allowing them to refine this set by stepping into sub-categories.

How to configure this behaviour

Please follow the instructions fund here: http://www.assetbank.co.uk/go/knowledgebase/show-assets-from-descendant-cats

We hope this list has been useful. If you have any feedback or questions then please get in touch: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk.

Thanks, Paul.

So, for example, say you sold products on-line and for each item you had a unique product code. Also imagine that for each product that your web team requires a small, medium and large web ready image for use on the site.

Solutions

There are two solutions for this:

1. Asset Bank Publishing Functionality. This allows you to specify a set of assets in Asset Bank and choose to have these output to a publish location (via simple copy, FTP or SCP transfer methods). In addition, Asset Bank can be set up to generate a sensible folder structure (e.g. based on the product code) and automatically generate all of the sizes required. Your web team can then use this as a basis to automatically populate the product pages on your website.
   
2. The Asset Bank API (Application Programmers Interface). This would allow your web development team to write code that would interface with your Asset Bank, find the relevant images (e.g. via the ‘product code’ attribute) and retrieve the different sized versions they need. More on the API.

In this article we will take a look at using the Publishing Functionality to solve this problem.

Step 1:

The first thing to do is ensure you have an attribute set up that contains each items product code via the ‘Admin > Attributes‘ area.

Step 2:

You would then go to ‘Admin > Download Options‘. Here you would create a new download usage type which will generate all of the image sizes requested by your web team, e.g.

• large 1,200 x 1,200 RGB JPG
• meduim 800 x 800 RGB JPG
• small 400 x 400 RGB JPG

Step 3:

Finally, you would set up the Publishing Action that would output versions of the these images to the location of your choice. Fig 1. below shows you the options available.

Fig 1. Setting up a Publishing Action in Asset Bank

Taking you through these options:

1/ Search Criteria: this allows you to specify the set of assets you want published. E.g. all assets marked with a specific ‘product’ access level tag.

2/ Publishing Options: here you can give your action a name, choose the transfer method (simple copy, ftp or scp <secure copy protocol>), specify the location you would like the files to end up in, choose the usage type from Step 2 to ensure the files you need are converted to the different sizes you require, select the attribute you would like to use for the folder names (here I would use the product code), select whether or not you would like this to run automatically each day or manually, and finally choose whether or not you would like any deletions in Asset Bank to be reflected when next you publish this set of assets (the Unpublish option).

The Result

Once completed and published, you will then have a folder structure that looks something like Fig. 2 below.

Fig 2. A folder structure created after an Asset Bank publish action

Here you will see that the product code is used as the folder name to group the images (’1234′ is my example code), additional sub-folders have been created to match the size options set up in Step 2, and the product images themselves have been automatically converted, resized and placed into the relevant folders. This is now ready for your web team to use.

Summary

Centralising and managing your digital assets in a DAM system is only part of the story. Ensuring different sets of users can interact with these resources in the most efficient way possible is also another aspect. Here we have introduced two additional methods (Publish and API) and shown how the publishing mechanism can work to automatically generate a folder structure of assets ready for use on a website.

If you have any feedback or questions then please get in touch: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk.

Thanks, Paul.

Admin > Reports > Search Reports

You have a few options here, but one of the most interesting is a grouped report of search terms that have failed to elicit a match. See Fig 1.

Fig 1. Generating a report that will highlight search terms that resulted in no matches

Once generated you can easily download it and open it in Excel, allowing you to re-order it to show the search terms that are most frequent.

What next?

Let’s imagine that the results showed that over the last six months 50 users searched on the term ‘Head Office’, but no results where returned. Yet as an admin user I know I have photos of my head office building in Asset Bank, but the term ‘head office’ is not in any of the metadata fields for these assets. The solution would be to add this additional metadata in, as we have found out that people often search on this term.

Of course, users may just be searching for items that simply do not exist in the Asset Bank in question. In these cases the admin user can decide whether or not it is useful to get hold of such material and upload it.

If you have any feedback or questions then please get in touch: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk.

Thanks, Paul.

First a quick summary of how Asset Bank makes use of image manipulation tools on upload to create previews of files that users see when browsing the Asset Bank site. Here we will concentrate on image files.

On upload:

You upload original image files to Asset Bank (e.g. a PSD or high quality Tiff) and it automatically generates three JPG versions of these that are seen when you browse around the site. These are:

• thumbnail (you see this when browsing or in search results)
• medium sized image (the default on the individual asset page, and also the pop-up you see when hovering over the thumbnail)
• large image (seen when browsing in large image view or after clicking ‘large image pop-up’)

These previews make it easy to identify the file you need prior to downloading it in the format and dimensions you require. So upload is all handled by Asset Bank automatically.

On download:

Admin users can set up different download pre-sets. E.g. ‘Original for Print’ or ‘Web 800 x 800′. The first of these allows the user to download the original file (e.g. a PDF, AI or high resolution Tiff). The second would proportionally re-size the image to fit within an 800 x 800 box and convert it to an RGB JPG for use on the web.

Admin users can create as many different download pre-sets as they’d like. They should take into consideration what users may need to use the assets for when coming up with this list, creating pre-sets for any commonly required sizes.

Scenario – setting up a download option for an Intranet News article size

Say that a company has a news panel on their Intranet homepage that requires a 400 x 400 pixel image to be uploaded for each news item. If this was a common size needed, then this could be set up as a pre-set in Asset Bank to allow staff to quickly find and then download an image of their choice and have it converted to match these requirements.

To achieve this an admin user would log in and go to:

Admin > Download Options

They would then set up a new usage type called, for example, ‘Intranet News Item’ for media type ‘Image’.

They would then specify details as shown in Fig 1. below.

Fig 1. Creating a usage type for an Intranet News Item

Here you can see that the width and height are set to 400 x 400 pixels. Additionally I  have selected ‘Crop to fit’ to ensure that the image is exactly 400 x 400 (rather than have an image scaled down proportionally to fit this bounding box). Finally, I’ve asked for it to be converted to a JPG with an RGB color space as I know it will be used on the web.

Now that this has been set up, let’s see it in action.

Step 1: The user finds an image to go along with their news article, clicks ‘download’ and choose this new download option (see Fig 2.).

Fig 2. Selecting an image and choosing the new download option

Step 2: The user is now asked to select a crop area from the image. This area can be scaled, but will remain proportional to ensure the resultant image is exactly 400 x 400 pixels in size. See Fig 3.

Fig 3. Selecting a crop area to be converted to a 400 x 400 pixel image

Step 3: After clicking ‘Crop & Close’ and then ‘Download Now’ the user ends up with the required file with 400 x 400 pixel dimensions on their desktop, ready to be used in their news article. See Fig 4.

Fig 4. The resultant 400 x 400 pixel image for use on the Intranet news article

Top tips for setting up download options:

1/ Find out what pre-sets would be helpful for your users – e.g. are there any special requirements as described above?

2/ Make the options as meaningful as possible so that users can quickly understand what they might end up with. E.g.

• Web – large  (1200 x 1200 pixels)
• Web – medium  (800 x 800 pixels)
• Web – small (400 x 400 pixels)

3/ Order the list so that the most frequently used options are at the top to make it more convenient for your users.

4/ Ensure a ‘Download Original’ option is present via quick download as this is a common need (e.g. for Print).

If you have any feedback or questions then please get in touch: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk.

Thanks, Paul.

Our suggestions for dealing with this are as follows:

Step 1:  Add and highlight a credit attribute

Add a ‘Credit’ text attribute and push it to the top of your attributes list so that it shows as close to the image in question as possible.

Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes

Optionally add a red box around this attribute to draw attention to it ([edit] the attribute and tick ‘Highlight on view’). See figure 1 below:

Fig 1. Show the credit info at the top of the attribute list and optionally highlight with red

Step 2: Map the credit value into the embedded metadata at download

Optionally map this credit information into the image itself (the embedded metadata) at point of download, so that the resultant image has the copyright information within it. To do this go to:

Admin > Attributes > Embedded Data Mappings (tab)

Choose the ‘Credit’ attribute.

Choose the embedded metadata field you would like to embed the information into (e.g. EXIF > Copyright). Choose the mapping direction as ‘Download’ and click ‘Add’.

Step 3: Display the credit info at point of download

It may also be worthwhile re-enforcing the credit information at point of download. To do this, edit the Credit attribute here:

Admin > Attributes > Credit [edit]

And tick ‘Show on download’, then click ‘Save’.

Now when you download a digital asset that has a value for this attribute, it will show up as per Fig 2. below.

Fig 2. You can display selected attribute information at point of download

Step 4: Adding in additional explanatory text

If you have a keen eye, you may be wondering where the additional explanatory text came from that is shown above in Fig 2. This is actually a piece of content managed text that will only appear if there is an attribute shown at this point in the download. I.e. say we had an image that did not have any information in the credit attribute field, then neither the attribute nor the explanatory text would show up on download. Exactly what we want.

To edit this piece of text go to:

Admin > Content > Page Copy [edit] > Copy – Download attributes intro [edit]

(Note, if this is not present, then you may be using an older version of Asset Bank, please contact us to find out about an upgrade.)

Step 5: Appending the information to the actual downloaded filename

This idea came from one of our Australian clients – thanks Graham.

Say that you still worry that the person who downloaded the file may eventually forget about all this credit information. Or say they leave and someone who replaces them comes across the file and thinks – “I’ll use this in a publication”. Even though the credit information is embedded in the file, they may not actually look at this. So another way to handle this scenario is to actually append the credit information to the filename itself.

To do this go here:

Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes > Downloading

And choose to add the credit information. See Fig 3. below.

Fig 3. I am constructing the downloaded filename from the ID and Credit info

Now, when I download an asset via Asset Bank it will always be named with the ID, with credit info appended to this if it exists (for assets without credit info, only the ID will be used).

This is how it looks on my desktop after I downloaded the file:

Now the credit info is hard to ignore by mistake.

If you have any feedback or suggestions about how to improve on this, then please email me: feedback@bright-interactive.co.uk

Thanks,

Paul.

If you would like to set this up on your Asset Bank, then the steps to follow are:

Step 1:

Create a new text attribute called ‘File Format’.

Step 2:

Set a mapping on upload to extract the file extension and push this into the new attribute.

Step 3:

To generate values for all existing assets in your system you will need to rerun metadata extraction for existing assets. You achieve this by clicking the relevant link on the following page: Admin > Attributes > Embedded Data Mappings

WARNING: Only do this if you are happy for all mapped fields to be overwritten. E.g. do not do it if you have keywords mapped on upload to a field that has subsequently been enhanced by users, as the new values will be overwritten. Contact support@assetbank.co.uk if you are unsure.

Step 4:

Make this new attribute visible on all asset panels (i.e. the boxes you see when browsing or looking at search results).

To do this go to:

Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes

and choose this attribute to appear on the panels (search, browse, list view and lightbox)

Step 5:

Finally, run a quick re-index (Admin > Attributes > ‘re-index existing items’) to update the panels.

Please remember though that users can convert assets to different formats at point of download, so this will only convey the format of the original file that was uploaded.