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Please note that this documentation is outdated.
Visit the Photo Organizer Wiki for current documentation. This will be fixed in a future release.
BULK UPDATEBulk update and bulk upload are two different things. Bulk update allows you to change the attributes of some of your photos at once that fulfill a given search criteria. Once you filled the search criteria, you need to enter an action, which means that you have to fill in those fields that you want to update. Fields that are left blank will not be modified by the bulk update. To perform a bulk update, press the Submit button at the bottom of the page. Certainly, there will be some actions that you want to perform frequently (like setting the author, caption writer, copyright note ... fields) therefore actions can be saved, modified or if no longer needed, they can be removed. Create a new ActionTo create an action, select the None value in the Recall Acton combo box. Chose a name for your action and fill it into the Current Action field. Fill in all attributes that you want to be saved with the new action and once you finished press the Save Action button. This will create in the database a new action, that will become your current action as well. Modify an exisiting ActionTo modify an existing action, recall it through the Recall Acton combo box. This will load the action that will become the current action as well. Modify the fields of your preference, then press the Save Action button. Note that you can also rename the action by changing it's name in the Current Action field. This will save your modifications in the database. Remove an ActionTo remove an existing action, recall it through the Recall Acton combo box. This will load the action that will become the current action as well. Press the Delete button to remove the action from the database. The bulk update feature allows you to regenerate the thumbnails and previews of your photos. This useful if you decide to change some photo import parameters, like sharpening factor, color space or watermark (these parameters can be changed via your settings). Note that the regeneration of your thumbnails and previews requires processor time. Make sure that your PHP is properly configured, so that it will allow scripts to run for a long enough time. SHOP ITEM GENERATORThe Shop Item Generator lets you define shop items of photos that fulfill a given search criteria. Before you can use the generator you need to create at least one shop item generator rule, which in fact is a generic shop item. You can define your Shop Categories and Shop Items in Your Profile. After you created some rules you can apply one or more of these rules on photos by selecting the search criteria and pressing the Submit button. XML CONVERTERSThe XML tools were created in order to ease the labour of bulk upload. You don't want to pay an other secretary to click through the PO web interface set all fields and type in captions. You need some kind of automated way to assign the exisiting shooting data to each of your photo before upload, then let PO do the rest. That's why you need XML files. You can convert your exisiting shooting data files into XML, which than can be used to automate bulk upload. So far three formats are supported:
SDF - Coocoon Creation's SoftTALK format; TXT - text file with tab separated fields used by gIcon; In case you have created your profile, the converter will include identifiers of all your equipment used in the creation of the photo, as well as the high resolution image name. The images to be uploaded must have a well formed name of the following format:
<file name><number>.<extension>
A valid filename woule be
After pressing the Most of you might not have a Nikon system and so perhaps the shooting data might be in some kind of other format, say Excel sheet. If you need converters from other formats send a mail to balint@k-i-s.net to discuss your request. XML GENERATORThe XML generator will compile an empty XML file where certain tags like the file name and the storage location are filled out accoridng to your specification. Other fields can be set to default values, which you can alter afterwards. PERFORM A BULK UPLOAD WITH XML DESCRIPTION
Now that you have got your XML description file we can
proceed and perform a bulk upload. First copy the XML
sequence that is displayed by the XML converter | generator
into a file called A sample XML file would look like this:
Let's see how is an XML document organized. For those not familiar with the XML volcabulary, the so called tags are colored with royal blue, the attributes are medium sea green and the attribute values are tan. The document has two parts, the first part describes the document version - which is the first line in our case - while the second part is the content of the XML file. Photo Organizer uses a three layer XML architecture. The first layer describes the operation, that is <bulkupload> in our case. In the future Photo Organizer will support other operations mainly to automate photo processing, but for now bulk upload is the only recognized operation. The end of the bulk upload description is marked by the </bulkupload> end tag. The second layer is embedded in the <bulkupload> tag and consistst of multiple <folder> tags. Everything that is described within the <folder> tags apply on the specified folder. In our case we will operate on folder with identifier 9 and 10. So far the XML file tells the system that we are going to perform a bulk upload into folder with identifier 9 and aferwards into folder with identifier 10. The folder identifiers are important to be correct, this was one of the main reasons to introduce XML tools. The third layer is embedded into the <folder> tag and consists of multiple <photo> tags. The <photo> tags describe each photo that will be uploaded into the folder that contains them. We will upload three photos into folder 9 and one photo into folder 10. The first photo description - with file name F.0023.0012.jpeg - contains all tags and attributes that are recognized by Photo Organizer. Each tag describes a certain property of the photo. As you can see not all tags and attributes are mandatory but the <file> tag, which is the most important one because this links the physical picture file with the photo description. All other tags are optional. Just like for folders the equipment and the shooting location is described with identifiers. If you are not using the XML generator to create an XML template, you can create your own XML document, but you will need to extract the equipment identifier which are displayed in your profile.
Now that you have your XML document let's compose the compressed
file for upload. In our case we copy _five_ image files into
a directory together with the XML description file named
Photo Organizer will recognize that you are uploading a compressed
file, that will be uncompressed. The system will seek first for
a file called |