The recommended method for migrating data (files and associated metadata) into Asset Bank is to:
- Create a data file by converting the metadata into the format recognised by Asset Bank's 'metadata import'. Depending on the format of the existing data (it might be in spreadsheets, in a legacy database, etc) it is often useful to write 'data migration' code or scripts to process the data and generate the data file. MS Access can also be useful for this.
- Import all the files using a 'bulk upload'.
- Import the metadata file.
This method relies on it being possible for Asset Bank to match each row of the data file to one and only one asset. For this to be the case there are two options:
- Ensure that all filenames are unique.
- Maintain the directory structure when importing the files, and ensure that the data file's AssetId column contains the corresponding directory paths as well as the filenames. Note: this option requires Asset Bank version 3.1367 or higher.
The steps below describe how to import the files and metadata into Asset Bank.
- Login as an admin user and go to Upload-> Bulk Upload, and click 'Start a new bulk upload'. This ensures that a bulk upload directory has been created for that user on the server.
- On the server (or using a file explorer such as Windows Explorer) go to this user's bulk upload directory. By default this will be within the asset-bank webapp in bulk-upload/[username]. Otherwise, check the setting bulk-upload-directory for the location of Asset Bank's bulk upload directory.
- Create a sub-directory in the user's bulk upload directory called (for example) 'to-import'.
- Copy all the files to be imported into the 'to-import' directory by recursively copying all the directories containing the files, for example from the network drive or USB drive where they are located.
- If you want to create categories in Asset Bank to match the directory structure the files were in, set the following settingbulk-upload-match-dir-names-to-cats=true (if you are using access levels as categories then this setting will create access levels).
- As the user in step 1, go to Upload->Bulk Upload and start a new bulk upload. Click 'Next' on the Flash Uploader page (as you have manually copied the files into the user's bulk upload directory). Choose 'to-import' from the 'Import assets from a directory' dropdown. Enter any metadata values you want to set for all files and then start the import.
- Wait until all the files have been imported. This could take some time!
- Check that the metadata file is in the right format (see help for metadata import) and then import it (Admin > Attributes > Metadata Import). As an example, if we want to populate an attribute with label 'Description' and ID 4 and an attribute with label 'Keywords' and ID 5, and filenames are unique, then the following will work:
filenameFormat:none |
||||
AssetId |
att:Description:4 |
att:Keywords:5 |
||
image1.jpg |
This is my description |
keyword 1, keyword 2 |
If filenames are not unique, and (for example) the file above was located in the directory images/people/staff then the format would be as follows:
filenameFormat:none | ||||
AssetId | att:Description:4 | att:Keywords:5 | ||
images/people/staff/image1.jpg | This is my description | keyword 1, keyword 2 |
For this to work, the directory 'images' would need to have been copied recursively into the 'to-import' directory as described in step 4 above.
Migrating a locally hosted Asset Bank to a cloud hosted Asset Bank
Another option if you are migrating from a locally hosted Asset Bank to a new instance in the Cloud, would be to export all the assets and metadata from the local version and re-import into the cloud version.
1) Select your assets in the locally hosted version by running an Advanced Search. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results and Export all results. Check the top option to Export asset files. This will generate a txt file with all your metadata and a 'ready for import' version of all the original assets.
2) Extract the zipped assets on your machine, and Upload to your cloud hosted Asset Bank. When all uploads complete, click next to enter the Metadata. If you want the Original filenames of the assets to be consistent with how they were in your local version, make sure you select the option to 'strip' the ID from the filename. Don't worry about the metadata, you'll be updating this from the txt file, so perhaps just populate title with filename, and allocate a 'holding' folder and start the import.
3) To apply the metadata from your txt file you'll need to do some data manipulation, typically in Excel. This will vary depending on the metadata schema similarity from the old version to the new. The key to coordinating the records is that you can use the 'imported asset id' as your unique identifier. To get this value, you'd use a concatenated value of the Original Filename (without the file extension) + (Old) assetId. You then need to use a capitalised version of the AssetId header to be your primary column.
Example
Data from exported txt file (Local Asset Bank):
file | assetId |
img_0025_34226601261_o.jpg | 1073 |
Converted to map into newly uploaded version that has a different assetId in the Cloud version:
AssetId |
img_0025_34226601261_o.1073 |
This addition to help section was added by Stewart Oak on 15/1/19
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