Tutorial Named Collections

Tutorial - Named Collections

In this section of the tutorial you will learn about Named Collections. Named Collections are essentially named subsets of images from your database. There are two stages to this tutorial:
Creating a named collection and adding images
Organising the named collection

Creating a named collection and adding images:

Select Collection - New Collection and type Demo as the name.
Select Collection - Active Collection and select your new Demo collection. Actually this step was unnecessary as the new collection was automatically made active anyway but it illustrates the technique for making a named collection active.
In the normal database view mode (View - Database). Select the Subject category and no others so that there are a number of images displayed.
Select a number of the images using the mouse with the shift and/or control keys.
Select Collection - Add Images and the selected images will be added to the active named collection - Demo.
Select Collection - View Collection or View - Active Collection to view the named collection images. You should now only see the images that you added to Demo.

You can continue adding more images to this named collection and any others that you create at any time in the future and they will be saved and available for viewing and modifying whenever the database is loaded. Whilst viewing collections the category tree will have no effect upon the images displayed. All the images in the active named collection will always be displayed. Also these images have a fixed order - they are not automatically sorted in any way - and that order can be manually modified - see below.

Note: no new copies of images are created in this process, the named collection is simply a collection of references into the main database of images, therefore if an image is removed from the database it will also be removed from all named collections that it appears in.

Organising the named collection

If you are not still viewing the Demo collection then switch back to view it again (View - Active Collection).
Right click on any image and select Pick up image. The surround for the image will turn red indicating that it has been "picked up".
Right click on any other image and select Drop image. The "picked up" image will be "dropped" immediately in front of the newly selected one.
When the move is only to be done locally (that is within the confines of the current window view) it can be done more easily by simply clicking and dragging the image to the new location (with the left mouse button). Also multiple images may be selected and moved together.

If you play a slideshow whilst viewing an active named collection then only the images in the named collection will be displayed. This is actually one of the main uses for named collections. Even if you do not plan to present a slideshow from a computer, the named collections provide a convenient way of organising slideshows and then storing them for later use. The View - Active Collection Listing is particularly useful for setting up the actual slide trays for a presentation as it just displays the named collection image indices in columns of 50 and can be printed. However named collections have many other uses. They can be used to generate a new database as a subset of the current one - this sample database was created in this way from my own database. They can also be used to create web sites of a subset of images from your database.

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