To ease your work Cumulus provides several sets and templates. Access to them is controlled via user permissions. Users who are allowed to create them can share them so that they are accessible to all users with the permissions to use them.

What Cumulus calls view sets are the screen layouts that enable users to interact with the metadata stored for the managed assets. Each View Set contains several different types of views, or view modes, including thumbnail view, list view, asset preview, and more. A single View Set represents the way each of these individual views appear to users.

View sets make it easy for you to switch between different views that are set up for certain formats or tasks. Once view sets have been appropriately defined to meet differing demands, you can switch between them with just a mouse click.

Each view in a View Set can contain a different array of metadata fields from a catalog. This is helpful because you don't likely want to see all data fields when looking at thumbnails, but you might want to see them when looking at an Information View. Some metadata fields, such as thumbnail or record name, might be useful in both views.

The ability to create different view sets enables you to configure screen layouts that are task or user specific.

When browsing catalogs for images, a layout artist might want to see a Thumbnail View that includes no other fields. To address this, you'd create a “Browsing” View Set. The omission of others fields in the Thumbnail View enables Cumulus to display as many thumbnails on a single screen as possible, which is great for browsing. The Info View of your “Browsing” View Set might include the remaining fields that a layout artist should see before making a selection, such as “License Restrictions,” “Copyright Notice” and “Approval Status” fields.

If that same layout artist was cataloging new assets, he/she would want to see more than just those few fields useful for browsing. She might need access to a “Notes” field, a “Production Status” field or even the “Categories” field, which enables her to easily see and edit the category assignments made for the asset.

These are examples of task-specific view sets. But user- or group-specific view sets are just as important. Your catalog might include financial or licenser contact fields that are of no interest to designers, but paramount to accountants. On the other hand, your accounts probably don't care about “Color space,” “File Resolution” or “Workflow Status” fields. You'd create view sets for them that include only the fields they need to see.

Access to view sets is permissions based, so you can easily determine which users can access which view sets. This is particularly important if any of your metadata fields contain sensitive or private information. For example, you might use “Notes” fields to enable managers to communicate thoughts to one another that designers shouldn’t see. Using view sets in this manner offers an additional layer of security to your metadata, but it also helps “clean up” everyone's workspace by displaying to them only what they need to see.

Cumulus categories have view sets of their own. We call these Category View Sets to differentiate them from the Record View Sets just covered.

Category View Sets are required because Cumulus categories also have metadata fields. This enables you to use categories as a type of “asset container” for project management—each category can have a manager, budget, due date, etc. Asset records added to the category are assumed to be a part of the project. Double-click on the category and you see all the assets used in it. In practice, Category View Sets are created, edited and chosen by users, just like Record View Sets.

Newly created Cumulus catalogs include default view sets for records and categories. These view sets include many of the default metadata fields created for each new catalog, which enables you to start managing assets immediately.

If you add any metadata fields of your own, however, you’ll also need to add those fields to view sets before users will be able to see the fields and edit their contents. You can add your custom fields to existing view sets, or you can create new view sets from scratch. There is no limit on the number of view sets that you can create.

View sets are not “connected” to any one catalog—they are Server specific. This means that each view set you create will potentially be available from all catalogs hosted on that Server. This enables you to create view sets that include fields from multiple catalogs. (Cumulus enables users to open several catalogs at once.)

You can limit view set access on a catalog-by-catalog basis, so if a given view set includes fields not found in other catalogs, you can create custom view sets for that catalog and configure user permissions to ensure that those view sets are not accessible in other catalogs.