Replacing assets in MB

bronny

Hello All,

This is my first time here and I am very new to MediaBin and have taught myself the system. I have been assigned to the task of cataloguing an old print photographic collection to MediaBin. Unlike many of you here, I am not a "developer" as such - I don't work in IT but I am a librarian and very experienced in the use of electronic cataloguing systems and databases. I'm not even sure if this is the right forum for my question - all the other posts seem very technical - but it's the only one I could find! Our system has been established by my department's IT section - and while I have had some input as to how we would like it to be for my purposes, I'm afraid the system is not ideal for me - so I have to make the best of it!
My question is this - is there an easy way of replacing one asset with another? I'm aware that this can be done with thumbnails but I wish to be able to replace the actual asset without too much hassle. I have asked our IT people but their solution is very cumbersome - and this needs to be done with a high volume of photographs - the reason being that I am putting a "temporary" image on a record (indicating where the hard copy is located), entering data and the actual photos will be scanned and hopefully will replace my temp assets later (I know it's strange - but it's all to do with lack of resources etc!)
I hope this all makes some sense - any ideas would be gratefully received.....

Bronny

lyman

All questions are welcome :-).

Simply put, replacing an asset is most easily done via a "check-in" whereby a new version of an asset replaces the old one. If one wanted to one could delete the prior revision, but generally people leave it.

It is not uncommon for people to upload a placeholder, and, in fact, we allow one to create a true empty placeholder without even uploading an image at all to serve as a holding place for the name and metadata until the asset data is added.

The only rule to remember is that all the custom metadata fields you may have defined are preserved between versions. The metadata that would normally be extracted from the image itself are freshly populated from the newly checked in image. This accounts for the use case in which, for example, someone checks out a JPEG, goes into Photoshop and removes the caption from within Adobe's "File Info" dialog, and reinserts the image.

Note that if you are replacing and not revising an asset, you can choose to "cehck-out" the asset without doing a retrieval. This is a bit faster as it tells the system that you only want to acquire the lock and therefore the right to check in a new asset without the overhead of retrieving the current copy.

Hope this helps,

Lyman Hurd
MediaBin Server Team


MediaBin Server Team
Interwoven, Inc.