Working with collections in Daminion Desktop Client
Collections are particularly useful when you need to group files for certain types of projects, such as marketing brochures, presentations, contact sheets, or web galleries, or when the order of digital assets is important.
Daminion displays your collections in the Tags panel under the Collection tag. You can create as many collections as you like and manage them like any other tags, i.e. add an unlimited number of items and delete the ones you don’t need, arrange hierarchical levels, search within collections, etc. Additionally, Daminion has a manual file-sorting option, available in the Collection tag only. This is particularly useful when files need to be in a specific order, e.g. when printing calendars.
Please keep in mind that the Collection tag is written to the metadata (XMP > Collection name).
Creating a new collection
On the Catalog Tags Panel, right-click the Collections header bar and select Add Tag Alternatively, press the Ins key on the keyboard.
In the dialog that opens, enter the name of your collection and hit the Create button or the Enter key on the keyboard.
To create a hierarchy within a particular collection, right-click the collection name and in the menu click Add Tag Inside or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Ins.
In the dialog that opens, enter the names of hierarchical levels separated by commas and check Add multiple values separated by a comma.
In the example below, we have created several collections for diverse purposes. The collection entitled ‘Best photos of the projects, 2016’ contains sub-levels. Red headings indicate the collection(s) that contain the selected image. In this example the same elephant image appears in two collections: ‘Do not send before Tuesday’ and ‘2nd quarter’.
Manual sorting
The Manual sorting option is available within single collections only. Use this option to arrange your files in the required order and send them to a PDF file, for example.
Select a collection. On the status bar (below the browser window), click the little triangle on the Sort By tab and select Manual Sorting from the drop-down menu.
You can now change the sorting order by dragging and dropping the files. If you switch to a different sorting mode – sorting by File Size for example – and then back to Manual Sorting, the order of your manually sorted files remains unchanged.
Removing collection tags from items
To remove collection tags from items, select the respective collection in the Catalog Tags panel. Next, select the item in the Browser window and do one of the following:
1. Click the file and then press the Delete button > select Remove.
This opens a dialog box that asks you to confirm that the selected item should be removed from the Collection tag.
Click Remove to remove the collection tag from the item. Select Remove from the catalog and check Move the file(s) to Recycle Bin if you want the items to be deleted.
2. Select the Collection tag, right-click it and select Remove “TagName” from selected item(s).
3. Another way to remove an item from a particular collection is to select the item and, on the Properties panel under the System tab, click 
on the collection you want to remove the item from.
