When working with Cumulus, you will encounter some central terms over and over again. These terms and their underlying concepts are crucial for the understanding of Cumulus:
Asset
Cumulus is all about organizing and managing your digital assets. Each and any digital file can be an asset – photos, graphics, PDF files, spreadsheets, Power Point presentations, even single slides from within a presentation, word documents, audio and video clips – you name it. An asset is a file with value added. And this additional value springs from the files’ metadata.
Metadata
Metadata is any kind of information about an asset – file name, creation date, modification date, author, size, number of contained characters, number of pixels, creating application, caption, comment, keywords, categories – whatever. some kinds of metadata are provided by the files themselves, others are supplied by Cumulus or Cumulus users.
Record
A record is the representation of an asset inside Cumulus – not the asset itself, but a set of information about the asset: its metadata. What kind of metadata are stored in a record depends on the kind of asset it represents as well as on the settings specified for the respective catalog.
Catalog
A catalog comprises all records created from your assets. Technically speaking, it is a database, and it is cross platform compatible and thus can be shared between Mac and Windows computers. You can even have more than one catalog, e.g. different catalogs for different asset types or purposes.
Collection
A collection is the body of all records you are actually working with, meaning all records from a single catalog, or a subsets of records belonging to one or several catalogs. For example, a collection may comprise only records that are relevant for the project you are currently working on, or records of a certain type, etc. Collections may be saved and re-used later on.
You can open several collections at the same time. Each of them can be displayed in its own Collection window within the Cumulus main window.
Categories
Last but not least, there are categories. Each asset can be assigned to one or more categories – and the other way round: each category can be assigned to one or several assets. Information about categories assigned to an asset is stored in the respective record as metadata. Categories are a great way to making your life easier and to quickly find the needles in the haystack of your assets.