Table of Contents
Real-life example: How we publish wirefeed content on our FotoWeb demo server
04. April 2025
Table of Contents
The challenge
At Fotoware, we have an incoming wire feed of photos and videos that allows us to replicate a real-life production system for testing our software.
Due to licensing restrictions, we only have rights to publish pictures and videos that are three days old or more on our demo servers. This has been solved by setting up a combination of Index Manager and Color Factory. Here's how it works:
- Incoming files from the feed are stored in a primary location – let’s call it Incoming assets. An index is set up for this area.
- A Color Factory channel is set up to query the index using a date search to only select files older than three days (newer files remain) and store them in a Delayed archive.
- The Delayed archive is indexed separately and available to authenticated users on the FotoWeb demo server.
The Color Factory channel is set to run once every 24 hours, so new files are fed into the archive every morning at 6am before we come to work. This also allows the extraction of thumbnails and keyframes for the video files by the time we log on to the server in the morning.
What you need:
-
Index Manager
- Two indexes – one for incoming files from the wire feed (Incoming), and one for the files that Color Factory pushes to the 3-day delay archive (Delayed)
-
Color Factory
- Input Options feature
- Auto routing feature
How it's configured
Indexes
Firstly, we create the two indexes. The Incoming index points to the document folder where the incoming wire feed is stored. This is the index that the Color Factory channel will query to pick out the files that are at least three days old based on the files' modification date. The second index (Delayed) points to Color Factory's output folder - and will only contain files that are at least three days old.
Color Factory processing channel
Having created the indexes as described above, we create a new Color Factory channel. The new channel wizard asks for a channel input folder; this is largely irrelevant since we will use an Index Manager search as the basis for file input into the channel, but the channel still needs an input folder - you can for example accept the default location suggested by Color Factory within the image base folder.
As the output folder, we choose the document folder that the Delayed index points to.
When choosing a file format, if the input files are JPEG, choose JPEG Copy to avoid recompressing the original JPEG data.
Next, we need to choose the features to enable in the channel. These are:
Input options - to set Color Factory to only run the channel once a day at a certain time, and to specify an Index Manager search as the channel's input.
Auto Routing - To create a practical folder hierarchy of files in the output based on the files' modification time by year, month and day.
Under the Input Options feature, set the Run schedule to control when the channel runs. In our case, we have set it to run once a day, every day, at 6am.
Next, in the Input Options feature, configure the channel to get its input from an Index Manager archive:
The syntax to retrieve files older than 3 days looks like this:
FQYFD contains (0~~%%INSDATE-3)
Here's a complete list of variables than can be used in the search string.
Make sure you tick the box to Delete input file after processing. That way, the original files are deleted after a copy has been transferred to the output, and the Input index will only contain the most recent files.
Next, we'll set up routing of files based on the modification year, month and day to create a meaningful folder structure in the output.
Clicking on the Auto Routing feature and then clicking on the Add button lets you choose Year Month and Day as the routing method:
Choose the formatting of the folder names using the available options as shown above.
Tip: Folder naming is based on the regional settings on the Windows server. If you'd rather want Color Factory to use English names for the folders, tick Always use English names instead of local.
Finally, save the configuration (File | Save configuration) and start the service to begin processing files. Remember to also start the Index Manager service.
All that remains now is creating a FotoWeb archive that connects to the Delayed index and setting access permissions on that archive.