What are archives?
Each archive in FotoWeb represents a set of files that you want to make available to one or more users. An archive connects to a storage pool and can contain anything from a few files up to several million files. The files themselves are stored in a cloud data center.
The indexing service handles crawling of the folders on the network drive, updates the indexes and processes searches from FotoWeb and FotoStation clients. With FotoWeb you can also apply search filters on the archive and access list levels to limit the actual files that a user sees when opening up the archive in FotoWeb. Read more about that below.
Access lists
An archive is associated with an access list. By adding users or groups to the access list, you control which users have access to the archive. If you expect to have many users on the system, it is recommended that you create a hierarchical group structure, and control the access to the archives mainly by adding the groups to the access lists. This will make your system much easier to maintain when the number of archives and users grow. To make the system more manageable, you can also import users from a directory service such as Active Directory or another SAML compliant identity provider.
Search filtering
You do not have to publish all the files in the archive to all users. By associating an archive with an auto search filter, you can control which files are available based on the search criteria. When the user makes a search in this archive, the user's search is combined with the search filter on the archive, so that the user is never able to see files that you did not intend to make available.
Auto search filters can be set on an archive in general, and also on the access list entry of a user or group. This is a useful method when you need to have exact control of who sees what, but do not want to create a large number of archives. If an auto search filter is set on both the archive and an access entry, the two criteria are appended to make a more restrictive filter.