iView Catalogued Date Script

iView Cataloged Date Script (for the US). As a slight break from the usual format of this blog, I am going to do something to actually benefit others, well have the slightest possibility to. The reason for this is that there maybe a number of other iView users out there wishing to have this functionality in iView as I wished, but are unable to find an existing solution on the internet ; as I did. Hopefully by leaving this here it will get picked up by the search engines and provide a solution to those seeking it.

The Problem
I used to use Extensis Portfolio for my digital asset management (DAM) and found that while it provided a very broad range of functions, its overall UI was poor and not particularly pleasant to use. Most of the dialogues reminded me of software circa Windows 3.1 – development took the form of adding function through yet more nasty dialogs. None of this made its operation particularly intuitive and, although improved with V8, I was still not all that impressed with it. I tried out iView mediaPro and was immediately more at home with its UI – and its common sense approach to layout and dialogs; it is just fairly apparent how to do something and doesn’t require delving through various nasty dialogs to do so. So I migrated.

Those 3 words, “so I migrated”, wrap up about 2 days solid work on devising a way to export the Portfolio database and import it into iView mediPro. I am not going to get into that here as it is a painful memory, but as I remember it I did eventually create some XML and VBA scripts to convert one to another. If anyone is interested, leave a comment and I will dig them out.

So, anyway, back to the point. There of course are some disadvantages to iView; as with all competing software the ideal seems to require a mixture of all offerings. Initially iView’s biggest disadvantage was that of speed, but this seems to have been greatly improved with the releases up to 3.1.1 to a point where it is now fine. There were also some scrolling issues but I have not witnessed these since installing v3.1.1. These afore mentioned issues are more generic to the package as a whole compared with Portfolio, but there are some functionality issues too. I found that iView’s auto cataloguing features far inferior to that of Portfolio. Initially this may sound trivial, but it can be a real pain. Let me explain. In Portfolio I could set the software up to automatically update specific folders and sub-folders which avoids the issue of forgetting to do so manually. iView is also capable of the same function, however the difference comes in the visibility of exactly what it has done whilst you were not involved. Portfolio offers a number of tools to see what cataloguing activities have been carried out, so allowing you to complete any metadata work on them. iView doesn’t offer any way of seeing what it has catalogued, other than the fact that by default it appends all new (automatic or manual) catalogued images to the end of the thumbnails. This is risky, in that if you manipulate the library or re-sort, those newly catalogued items will find their way to their correct location in the library – making it extremely difficult to find. For this specific reason I felt unable to allow iView to use any automatic cataloguing; instead having to carry out all the cataloguing manually and step by step so that I could keep track of what it was importing. This turned into a bit of an issue, as I was forgetting to update some files and folders. I decided that I had to find a way of letting iView import any and all new items in my main image folders, but still be able to find them and work with them at any time. Portfolio offers a fairly simple mechanism to do this, with its more advanced search dialogue you can specify to show items catalogued between two dates; and that is all that was needed. Upon looking in iView for similar functionality I found that while it does offer to “Show Last Import” this only shows the last folder catalogued. This means that if a number of folders were updated in an auto import then you will not be able to highlight any but the last. iView also offers a search key based on catalogue date, it only allows searching for items catalogued on, before or after a specified date. This doesn’t work for my purposes as if I wanted to show all items catalogued in the last week, there is no way to do that. One ray of hope that this dialog did provide however, was that each item in the database must be date stamped with the date, and hopefully time, that it was catalogued.

The Solution
A quick look in iView’s object model reference showed that indeed it does store, for each item, a catalogued date/time stamp. So it was just a question of writing a script that would look at each file in the library and see if this stamp matched a set of criteria that I could specify, and then do something with those files so that I could immediately identify them and allow me to work on them.

So that I could confidently capture any automatically catalogued files, I needed to allow the script to find files catalogued over various time frames, as only looking back one day might miss some catalogued the previous day, but there would be times when I really only wanted to see that last set of items catalogued.

I also wanted to do something other than just select the files it found matching the criteria. This would work fine and allow me to do what I needed with them manually, but if I was writing an automated script it really should extend to cover all functions that can be automated. I decided that a perfect solution would be to create a new Catalog Set specific to that search and add the matching items to it.

The screenshot at the top shows the end result of running the script. It has created a new Catalog Set named with a date/time stamp and how far back the search went. From here these can be worked on easily without fear of losing track of them, and then the Catalog Set simply deleted once you are happy they are complete. (The files themselves remain unchanged.)


Once the script is installed (see below), it can be run on any catalogue and will initially ask you the time frame over which you want it to match criteria. It will then run through the entire catalogue and if the item’s added to catalogue date falls within the criteria it selects it, if it doesn’t it deselects it. It is necessary to deselect so to avoid any items selected prior to running the script turning up in the results. Once it has finished it will ask you whether you want to add them to a new Catalog Set, I don’t know why you wouldn’t but the option is there. Note: You will need to have Catalog Sets visible in the Catalog Fields section to see and work with any Catalog Sets.


And that is it. Feel free to do with it as you wish.

Install
The script is written with VBS, so Mac users might have to convert it to JS or AS. To install it simply create a new folder in the iView plug-ins scripts folder (nominally C:\Program Files\iView MediaPro3\Plug-ins\Scripts\ on a Windows platform, Mac will be much the same) called My Script (or anything you like) and save this script file into that new folder. Upon restarting iView mediPro, this new folder will appear under the Scripts menu item, and the script will be available. Just click on it to run.

Finally, for any coders, I know it isn’t that clean. Don’t bother me about it.