Structuring your assets in a meaningful way
This topic is meant to give you some initial ideas on how to structure content when you're building or restructuring an archive. It deals briefly with how to automate the structuring of your content using an ingestion workflow and how files that are submitted to the system can be picked up by Color Factory and routed to a subfolder while metadata is verified in the process to make sure the asset(s) can be retrieved later by users of FotoWeb and FotoStation.
What makes structuring content hard
Structuring content is difficult for several reasons - different people work in different ways and have different opinions about how an archive should look and feel. Also, as changes happen over time, the structure you set out with may no longer be ideal, so you should make sure you can redo your structure if the need arises.
The purpose of this topic is not to provide an exhaustive set of rules to add to the confusion, but rather to help you know what tools Color Factory offers to help you organize your archive structure once you've decided how you want it to be.
Planning for existing and future assets
You likely have existing assets in a structure already. Are there existing naming conventions in place for any of those files that you can turn into valuable metadata? Or folder structures / names? Using Color Factory's file name and folder name to metadata functionality may help you populate metadata fields that becomes meaningful, searchable content.
Are any of your assets cataloged in a database already? Perhaps you can use Color Factory to extract some of that content and store it in the metadata fields within the files?
Building folder structures
As an archive builds, you will need to add a level of metadata governance to the ingestion workflow, so that valuable metadata is added to files that are contributed. This can of course be implemented on the client side of things, with workflows that require users to input metadata before a file is submitted to the archive. Color Factory can then be used to validate that the required metadata is filled in and route files to that archive if all is good, but to another output if additional information is required. Using Color Factory's automatic routing you can validate metadata and build output folder structures according to almost any criterion, so that files stored in your archive are neatly sorted and categorized and ready to be indexed and published to Fotoware clients in the network.