« Part 1 • Metadata and Annotations • Line Breaks • Regeneration

So you have read part 1 of the Getting Started article and you successfully created your first gallery? Fine. You have read the top entries in the FAQ and the introduction to Customization? Very good. On this page you will learn how to control the EOS template using metadata.


Metadata and Annotations

Metadata is some kind of text information that is stored within the image file. As a photographer you know the EXIF data fields that hold the shooting data in the image files. In addition to the EXIF data fields there are IPTC data fields which are mostly used be press photographers to describe the image and include copyrights. You can find some background information at iptc.org.

Annotations is an iView proprietary term. It's similar to IPTC fields but their content is stored in the iView database instead of the image file. iView MediaPro is able to read the IPTC fields and import their values to the Annotations fields. However if you want to use the values in another image application, like Adobe Photoshop or JAlbum, then you need to export them manually. You can open the Sync Annotations window if you select Action → Sync Annotations...



If you click on the Info button in the tool bar the Annotations fields are shown on the left side of your iView window. Note that the field names depend on your setting of the Field Names! You can change the setting if you go to Edit → Preferences... → General. We recommend to go with the IPTC Core names.



The following screenshot shows the Annotations fields for each setting:




Below is a summary of the EOS relevant field names:

IPTC Core
field name 		PS CS
field name 		iView v2
field name 		EOS feature Sample Content
Headline Headline Title Special Items DVD slideshow
Instructions Instructions Instructions Section Name Miscellaneous
Description Description Caption Image Description Works with standard
DVD players.

Note that you can batch edit a group of pictures! That is an essential feature when you want to define sections in your gallery.

If you work with sections I recommend to display the Instructions value below the thumbnails. That give a better overview. In the screenshot below we have used different color labels for better visibility. Labels are not related to sections.



The EOS template features special items and section won't be explained here in detail because they are not iView specific.


Avoid Line Breaks

It is important to know that until iView MediaPro v2.6 all special characters were replaced with HTML conform entities.

Examples are:
< became &lt;
> became &gt;
" became &quot;
[new line] became <br \>
It was possible to suppress the substitution process if you checked "Treat captions as raw HTML" in the HTML settings window, in order to use HTML code in the Caption but the new lines were always replaced with the HTML entity <br \>. That was fine.

Since iView MediaPro v3.0 it is not possible anymore to convert special characters into HTML conform entities! The checkbox "Treat captions as raw HTML" in the HTML settings has absolutely no effect.

Here is the bummer: if you write a double quote or a line break in the Description/Caption field the web page will not work since it corrupts the Javascript code! You have to eliminate those characters from your image captions or revert to iView MediaPro v2.6.

I have reported this behavior to iView and posted in the iView forum but got no response so far. To be on the safe side the Description feature has been disabled by default! That means your image captions will never show up in the gallery.

If you want to show image captions, first make sure that your Description fields do not contain line breaks then go your EOS template folder and open the file "media.html" in a simple text editor, like notepad. Seach for the first occurrence of "(iView.Caption)" and change it to "(iView:Caption)". In other words, replace the dot with a colon. Then generate a new gallery.


Regenerate the Gallery

You need to re-generate the gallery when you make changes in...

  • ... the image order.
  • ... the image file names.
  • ... the image selection (add or omit some).
  • ... the Annotations data of the images.
  • ... the HTML settings, like title, size, watermark or quality.
  • ... any of the three EOS template files (see above).

If you edit a file in the EOS template "assets" subfolder you have copy the file to the "assets" subfolder in the output directory afterwards. Regenerating the gallery would have the the same effect but it takes takes much longer. Of course, you can also edit the file directly in the "assets" subfolder in output directory but if you forget to copy it back to the template folder your changes will be lost after the next regeneration of the gallery. Changes in the "eoscommon" folder can be made any time and do not require a regeneration.

Note that always a new gallery is created and all existing data will be overwritten. iView is not able to use the available images, like other applications do. This can be a real pain when you need to regenerate a gallery. If your gallery has several hundred images it can take hours where other applications only needs a few seconds for the same task.

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