Imagine you’ve got a whole lot of images and PDF files – photographs, product descriptions, newspaper articles –, files you may want to share with other people like customers or employees. Of course you don’t want anybody to mess things up in your file system or local network, or to modify your original assets.

That’s why you need Cumulus.

Setting up a catalog of your own is easily done – assumed, of course, that you have been granted the appropriate permissions.

Technically speaking, a catalog is a database that holds all the information about your assets. A catalog does not contain the assets themselves, but records about them – one record per asset.

Thus, it is crucial to ensure that your new catalog contains all appropriate data fields for the storage of the desired information. To make things easier, Cumulus provides preconfigured Catalog Templates for different purposes. For example, a catalog based on the Catalog Template for Images contains fields for picture-specific information like the EXIF data or the IPCT data that is contained in your digital photographs. This would not be the case with a catalog based on the Standard Catalog Template.

Only with the Share catalog option activated, other Cumulus users can access the new catalog, too. That is, if they have the appropriate permissions. But user management and permission handling are different stories, and not in the scope of this Quick Start Guide.

Before you actually start to catalog your assets, there is one more topic to be considered: Where will your cataloged assets reside? You have two options: either leaving them where they are, or copying them to a central storage location.

Cumulus can manage assets regardless of their storage location in your file system. Perhaps you have already set up a folder hierarchy that fits your specific needs or your sense of order. Then there is no need to change that. The cataloged assets remain where they are. Cumulus, however, will preserve your order and map it out in the Sources categories, thus allowing you to easily navigate within a structure you are already familiar with. If that is the case, you may now begin to add assets to your catalog, just as described in the chapter “Files to Assets: Cataloging Your Digital Files”

On the other hand, you might consider to collect your newly cataloged assets in a central storage place on your file server. This might be a good idea especially if the files you want to catalog and manage with Cumulus are scattered all over your hard disks or your local network. It is also more secure to use a central location, because it lowers the risk of accidentally corrupting your data structure. Arbitrary files or folders are easily moved or deleted, and even though this would not affect your catalog or the contained records, the assets referenced within them could no longer be accessed.

So, if you do want to have your assets copied to a central storage location just while cataloging them, here is how:

Now you can begin to add assets to your catalog, just as described in the chapter “Files to Assets: Cataloging Your Digital Files”. During cataloging, the assets are automatically copied to the Central Asset Location defined for your catalog.