Remember what we said at the beginning of this Quickstart Guide: Cumulus is all about organizing and managing your assets. However, in order to do so, Cumulus leaves the actual assets alone and only handles their 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.
There are countless possibilities for metadata, depending on the type of asset. Some of them, such as file name, date, or size, apply to all assets, others only to certain asset types. Data like aperture or exposure time make sense with photographs, but not with, say, PDF files.
A lot of metadata is supplied by the asset itself. The user, however, can add as much user-defined metadata as needed. Adding various kinds of metadata to your records – or modifying existing metadata values – can not only considerably facilitate the organizing of your assets, but can also substantially increase their value. You already got to know the commenting function (see “Commenting On Your Assets” ), which provides some quite a sophisticated ways of adding metadata to your assets. But there’s a whole bunch of other options, too.
Whether values are editable or not depends on the settings of the catalog and on your user permissions. Most likely, you will at least be able to edit fields like Notes, Keywords, or Rating. In the Information window, user editable fields have a white background color, while fields whose values cannot be changed have a grey background color.
To edit a metadata value in the Information window, e.g. to add a note:
1. Select the record to which you would like to add a note and click the Information window button () in the main toolbar.The Information window appears.
2. If necessary, change the Record View Set, scroll through the Information window, or expand/collapse sections until you see the Notes field.
3. Click into the Notes field and type in your note (e.g., “What a beautiful picture!”).
4. Save your modification by clicking the Save button () in the Information window toolbar.
Your note is saved with the record.
If you forget to save your modification, Cumulus will ask you to do so as soon as you select a different record.
Cumulus categories are used to organize records, much like folders are used to organize files in a traditional filing cabinet. But as well as a category can be assigned to any number of records, the contrary is also true: any asset can appear in any number of categories. This not only facilitates retrieving assets, but allows for the creation of a network of relations between assets. That is the big difference between categories and folders in a filing cabinet or even in an operating system.
By default, each Cumulus catalog comes with three master categories – Sources, Keywords and Categories. Each master category has its own hierarchical structure of nested subcategories. Whether all master categories are displayed in the category pane or only one of them is up on you. Just open the drop-down list on top of the Category pane and select the type of category you want to display.
You’ve already learned how to use categories as one of the easiest methods to quickly find assets – double-clicking a category displays all records assigned to that category in the current collection (see “Finding Assets: Search by Category” ). But how do assets get categorized?
Automatically Created Categories
First of all, Cumulus automatically adds source categories to the metadata during the cataloging process. (Other categories can be automatically added, too, but that’s another story.) The Sources categories reflect the folder or directory hierarchies in which the assets were stored when they were cataloged.
Categories Created by You
Apart from the automatically created categories, it’s basically up to you to categorize your assets – provided, as always in Cumulus, that you have the appropriate permissions. If in doubt, talk to your Cumulus Administrator!
To take full advantage of Cumulus, you have to create and implement your own category tree, either as Categories or as Keywords or both (but it is a good idea not to tamper with the automatically generated Sources categories).
You might ask yourself, what is the difference between Categories and Keywords? Well, basically, they are the same thing, the difference is merely a semantic one.
For example, you could devote Categories to reflect the states of a workflow, or the structure of your organization, and use Keywords to tag your assets and make them accessible with regard to their content. That is completely up to you – or maybe rather to your Cumulus Administrator.
To create a new category (no matter whether under Categories or under Keywords):
1. Right-click the category in which the new category should be nested.
2. From the Shortcut menu, select New Category.
This creates a category nested in the selected category.
3. Give the new category an appropriate name.
You can easily change the category hierarchies by dragging a category onto another category anywhere in the category tree(s).
Assigning Records to Categories, or Vice Versa
Assigning categories to records, or records to categories, is easy:
1. Select a category or several categories and drag them onto the record you want to assign them to.
OR
Select one or several records and drag them onto the category you want to assign them to.
That’s handy if you only have to deal with a few records and a few categories. But with lots of categories and lots of records, its much more convenient to use the Assign Categories menu item:
1. Select the records you want to categorize.
2. Select the categories to which you want to assign the selected records.
3. Select Metadata > Assign Categories. The records are assigned to each of the currently selected categories.
) in the main toolbar.The Information window appears.
) in the Information window toolbar.