Table of Contents
Creating a standardized set of categories when receiving wirefeeds
04. April 2025
Table of Contents
Overview
Learn how to map input categories from your wirefeeds to something that makes sense for your internal use.
Scenario description
In environments that receive wirefeeds from different sources, the categories that are used by vendors may vary. This can make it hard for your users to know which categories to search for to find the assets they're after.
By managing your input workflows with Color Factory, however, you can map the different categories used by your providers to a homogeneous set that makes sense for your internal use. Effectively, this means that while three different wirefeed providers may use three different metadata abbreviations for e.g. the Sports category of pictures, you can have channels that change all the input categories using a preset association table.
How to configure this
You start by creating a channel that pulls files from your input or inputs. Depending on how your wirefeed transmissions are set up you may have to create separate channels for each input.
The channel that you're setting up needs only one feature to perform mapping of input categories, that's the Metadata feature. Enable that and choose an output format for your files. Assuming you're receiving JPEGs through the feed, you can use JPEG Copy as output format to avoid quality loss.
Now you need to configure the metadata mapping: Expand the Metadata feature node in the channel, and on the first page (General) you will find a button called Category Code mapping. Here you can define the input categories from your wirefeed providers and the corresponding category you want to replace them with.
The below screenshot shows how we have mapped a number of categories to new abbreviations.
Tip
If you need to map the contents of other fields you can use the General Metadata Macro on the same configuration page to replace the content of any field with new content. The Category mapping outlined above pertains only to the Category XMP field (Field #015 in the IPTC standard).
Power tip
If you plan to do automatic routing by the Category field in the same channel, to create a neat folder structure based on categories in your output, you will need to base the autorouting feature on the input categories, not on the new categories that you specify using category code mapping. The reason for this is that automatic routing is performed before the categories have been mapped. An alternative is to combine these two operations in two chained channels
Learn more about the order in which Color Factory executes its processing.