In Portfolio, a catalog is a collection of digital assets, typically related either in the simplest sense (they’re all your organization’s assets) or based on some organizational principle (they’re all the assets used by the News department of the East Coast division).

Portfolio lets you have many catalogs to satisfy your organizational needs. The benefit of dividing assets into catalogs is that you can specify a user’s ability to access assets at the catalog level. A user who needs to access News assets may not need to access Reality TV assets. By creating a catalog for each set of assets, you can remove the possibility of issues arising from too many users having access to assets.

Creating a catalog

To create a Portfolio catalog:

1. Click Catalogs.

2. Click Add  above the list of catalogs.

3. Enter the catalog name.

4. Specify a catalog template.

5. Choose a Collation method from the drop-down menu.

   This setting determines how Portfolio sorts information in your database.

6. Choose a Storage Type.

   For a Vault catalog, you can enable Asset Versioning.

   For a Watch Folders catalog, you can create an AutoSync folder that users can access immediately.

7. Click Create.

Catalog types

Portfolio provides two types of catalogs: the more traditional Watch Folder catalog, which works with asset files stored on your network, and the Vault catalog, which stores assets in a location that’s managed by Portfolio.

The advantages of the Watch Folder catalog are that it can take advantage of available storage anywhere on your network, and users can add assets to a catalog by adding a file to a “watched” folder. The main disadvantage is that these files are open to access from other users and applications, who could modify, damage, or delete them.

The advantage of the Vault catalog is that Portfolio manages access to your assets, which lets users check out assets to edit them. Portfolio retains multiple versions of assets, which reduces the risk of loss. The primary disadvantage is that you could need a large amount of storage space on your server for your catalogs.

Catalog templates

Catalog templates make it simple to configure a new catalog for a specific purpose. Portfolio provides four catalog templates. Each template is a starting point from which you can further customize your catalog.

You can measure the benefits of choosing the appropriate catalog template in time. Since Portfolio automatically creates many custom fields for you, the setup time required will be considerably shorter. Also, if you don’t need to have a many custom fields, accessing and searching a catalog is much quicker.

Regardless of which catalog template you choose at the start, you can add and delete custom fields and update metadata mappings to fit your specific needs.

The default catalog templates are:

• General Use: The General Use catalog template includes many default custom fields for a wide variety of metadata, including EXIF, IPTC, and XMP fields. Use this catalog template if you want to include all these fields in your catalog, or if you aren’t sure what type of media will be in your catalog.

• Simple: The Simple catalog template doesn’t have any custom fields, and isn’t configured to extract metadata from files. The simple catalog template is useful as a starting point for complex catalogs that require specific custom fields and metadata extraction settings that you want to configure manually. This catalog template includes Keywords and Description fields, and you can configure it to extract metadata into these fields. Portfolio automatically adds keywords to the catalog, based on each file’s parent folder and filename.

• VRA Core: The VRA Core template is based on the data standard for the description of works of visual culture and the images that document them. For details, see VRA Core Support Pages.

Catalogs and users

In Portfolio, you must assign a user a role in a catalog in order for that user to access the catalog’s assets. You can assign a role manually at any time, automatically when you create a user, or through your network’s Active Directory service.

• To assign a role manually, see Catalog access.

• To assign a role when you create a user, see Adding user accounts.

• To assign a role through Active Directory, see Mapping users from Active Directory.

Deleting a catalog

When you no longer need a catalog, you can delete it from Portfolio. When you delete a catalog, Portfolio removes all asset metadata. You should only do this when future access to those assets isn’t required.

Deleting a Watch Folder catalog doesn’t remove the assets referenced by the catalog.

To delete a catalog:

1. Click Catalogs and select a catalog.

2. Click Remove  above the list of catalogs.

3. Click OK in the confirmation dialog.