Monday, December 16, 2013

Save time editing media properties with multiple select

This is a great trick that lets you spend less time managing your gallery and more time sharing it with others. You probably already know you can easily edit the property of an album or media object using the right pane. For example, here I’m tagging a photo with the word ‘Bird’:

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Notice as I type I get a drop down showing tags that have been applied to other gallery objects. This makes it easy to reuse tags and prevent misspellings.

We can also tag media objects from the album thumbnail view by selecting the media object and applying the tag:

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TIP: When selecting the thumbnail, be sure to click in the border area outside the image. If you click the image, the gallery takes you to a page showing the full size version of the media object.

Okay, updating one media object at a time is easy enough. But what if you want to apply a tag to a bunch of items at once? For example, what if you want to tag every photo in an album with the word ‘Bird’? The answer lies in the multi-select feature built into Gallery Server Pro. Select the desired items and then update the property. When you exit the field, your changes are applied to all selected items.

There are two ways to select thumbnails: drag-select and control-click. Drag-select means using the mouse to drag a rectangle around the desired thumbnails. Control-click involves holding the Ctrl key down and left-clicking thumbnails. When a tag has been applied to more than one item, it displays the quantity in parentheses. Here I’ve drag-selected the thumbnails and applied the ‘Bird’ tag to all 25 photos in the album:

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Deleting tags from multiple items is just as easy. Select the thumbnails and then click the ‘X’ on the tag you want to delete.

This trick works for any of the properties in the right pane. For example, you can change the title of all items and then edit individual ones as desired. Or control-click your favorites and give them a five-star rating with a single click.

Note that some properties are not editable by default. For example, the width and height of images are read only. To make them editable, go to the Media Objects – Metadata page in the Site Admin area and select the Editable attribute for the desired properties.

Editing the properties of multiple items at once is a big time-saver. Enjoy your gallery!

2 comments:

Kees en Lily Hessels said...

Are the properties only updated in de GSP-database, or also in the picture-files-metadata themselves?

Roger Martin said...

Currently only the GSP DB is updated, but we are looking into adding support for pushing meta data back into the original files. Roger