...for the Professional

...for the Professional

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If you've just jumped in here hoping to cut short the getting started process, you really would do better to start with the Introductory topic and then work your way through. Like all good tools, FilFolio™ takes a bit of knowledge and skill to use.

This method for setting up your mappings relies on using FilFolio™'s Explorer Pane to identify those items of metadata that you want in your catalog. To ease this process you are going to look at the actual metadata in your images before deciding which metadata you want to add to your catalog. So, you don't need to worry about tags and EXIF and stuff, but please be aware of the blobs.

If the previous paragraph wasn't technical enough for you, then you are probably going to find it more rewarding to set up your mappings using the Expert's approach. If that doesn't work, be sure to come back here and give this way a try...

To begin, click on the Explore item in the command list in FilFolio™. You will then see the Explorer Pane and it will look something like this:

pane explorer

Click in the screenshot to see what the different parts are.

You can also sort this display by clicking on the heading of any of the columns.

What you're actually seeing here is all of the metadata items in the image file that FilFolio™ has recognized and could transfer to your catalog. Those that are marked with red or green blobs are the ones that will be transferred to your Portfolio™ catalog. Use the navigation buttons to explore as many images as you want, to get a feel for the metadata that's there. (To ensure that you can explore the images you want, click on the Explorer Action Button and select Explore All.

The navigation buttons look like this

and they allow you to move through the current gallery image by image, forwards and backwards or jump to the first and last images in the gallery.

Anyway, the object is to select as many or as few of the items to include in your mappings. To do this you need to follow these steps:

	1.	Decide which items of metadata you want to store in your Portfolio™ catalog. Do this by looking at each Metadata Standard Name (in the third column). Select each of the items that you want in the normal Windows way by a combination of click, shift-click and control-click; you might end up with something that looks like this:



		Here, 3 additional items (Software, DateTime and BrightnessValue) have been selected and the screenshot shows the Explorer Action Button being used to add those selected items to the current mappings. You can see that you could also remove the selected items from the mappings or, at one fell swoop, add all items to the mappings and even remove all items from the mappings. You should continue adding and subtracting items until you are happy that you have all you want.

	2.	Decide whether you want to use the Metadata Standard Names for your custom fields in Portfolio™. If you do then just go on to the next step. If you don't then you need to switch to the Mappings Pane and continue with step 2 in the ...for the Expert topic.

	3.	Because you'll need to close FilFolio™ before proceeding, it's a good idea to copy your mappings to a text file. Click on the Action button and then click on the Copy to clipboard menu item as shown here.



		Then run Windows Notepad, or whatever your favorite text editor is, and paste the contents of the clipboard into a new document. It will look something like this:



		These are the names of the custom fields you must create in Portfolio™.

	4.	Now you need to make some changes to your Portfolio™ catalog. So, close FilFolio™ and go to this topic.