Overview 

Your Fotoware site has several premade archives, and you're free to use these and upload content.

This topic aims to explain how archives work and, not least, how you can create additional archives and make sure the assets you upload to your Fotoware end up in the archive you want them to.

Understanding Archives and Pools 

To create a new archive or modify an existing one, go to the Site Configuration via the Tools menu (cogwheel icon) in the top right-hand corner of your Fotoware homepage. Then locate the Archives node in the site configuration.

When creating an archive, you'll notice that the archive must be assigned to a storage Pool. How many pools do you have at your disposal? It depends on your Fotoware plan. The Pool is a container for files, much like a folder, where files end up when you upload them to Fotoware. The archive, in turn, sits "on top" of the pool, and you can have several archives pointing to the same pool. Access rights, metadata rules, etc. are set at the archive level.

When more than one archive points at the same pool, they will display the same contents since the archive is simply the entry point to the pool. So, to display distinct types of content in different archives, you need a search filter on the archive level. This way, one archive can display, e.g., the photos you have uploaded, while another archive shows your presentations.

The key to accomplishing this is metadata: There are several approaches here, but the typical one is configuring the upload process so that users set a target archive in a metadata field during upload. Then, a corresponding search filter set in the archive's properties looks for that specific metadata, and voila, the archive displays only that subset of files in the storage pool.

To illustrate: A business has three departments: Department 1, Department 2, and Department 3.
When uploading assets, a user selects his department from a drop-down list containing the departments' names, and that metadata is applied to all the upload files.

A corresponding search filter on each archive is set only to show the assets that belong to that department. In turn, the archive's access list ensures that only members of each department can access the relevant assets.

In the archive configuration, this is what it looks like:

When a Fotoware site is set up for the first time, Metadata field 800 is typically used as the "Archive" designator field. That field is typically defined as required during upload and reflected in each archive's search filter.

Summing up: 

• Storage Pools are the physical containers where uploaded assets are stored in Fotoware.
• Archives are logical containers that use a search filter to display a subset of files in the storage pool.
• A metadata tag is used to determine the target archive during upload. This tag is used in the search filter of archives to determine which files show in which archives.
• Access to resources is controlled on the archive level.

What's next? 

The next article in the series will discuss best practices when configuring Metadata Views - the collections of metadata fields - and how to associate them with archives.