Introduction to Collections
Collections are the most important type of resources in the FotoWeb API. A collection contains assets and sometimes other collections called sub collections.
For example, an archive on a FotoWeb site is a collection. It contains assets, which represent physical files on disk discovered by an IndexManager server. Every archive has folders, which are sub collections. Folders again contain assets and possibly sub folders, which, again, are collections.
Other examples of collections are albums and search results.
Every collection is a resource, so it has a distinct URL.
Using Collections
The following can be done with all kinds of collections using the FotoWeb API:
- Listing assets in the collection (browse)
- Listing sub collections of the collection
- Getting thumbnails and metadata of assets in the collection
The following features are supported by some but not all types of collections:
- Searching for assets in the collection and in sub collections
- Changing the poster asset of the collection
- Deleting the collection
- Adding and removing assets
- Uploading assets
- File operations (copy, move, delete, rename)
- Updating metadata of assets
Browse, retrieve all assets, all sub collections, information about the collection (name and url, poster image, asset count)
Types of Collections
The following resources in the FotoWeb API are collections:
Representations
Each collection has at least the following representations: