The ability to manage related assets has been a feature of Cumulus for a while. The images you place in layouts, the many photos you have of the same subject, and even the PDF you create from a Word document can be virtually connected, making it easy for you to find one based on another. Cumulus automatically manages contained and referenced assets, e.g. images contained within other assets like a Word document or presentation.
In earlier Cumulus versions, you could also pick from predetermined relation types – variants and alternates – that enabled you to establish a relationship between those types and the related master file, i.e. link variations of a file with a ‘master original’, and locate these as easily as you locate assets embedded in other files.
Alternates allow images of the same scene or product but from differing angles to be associated. This is handy if you are in the marketing department of an organisation, or an architecture firm. Variants can associate the same image but in different formats, such as a jpeg, png or Photoshop file – they can all be associated with one another.
What if your organisation has different needs and requires more options? Canto listened and Cumulus 10 now introduces the ability to customise relation types. Create your own custom relationships based on the type of asset or any other criteria that suits your business. A new custom relation type may be created via the Catalog Settings and is immediately available.
Consider this – a men’s design label has created a brand new cut of business shirts in various patterns and colours. With the custom relations function you can now create a relation for that particular style of shirt, let’s call it the ‘Newtown’ cut. The custom relation can be called ‘Newtown’ and a source image allocated e.g. the white version. Once this is done all other patterns and colours in the style can then be related to the custom relation.
This new functionality can be applied to any number of solutions of any industry that needs to relate assets aside from the alternate or variant relationships. How the custom relation is applied to your specific circumstance is limited only by your business needs.
In Cumulus Web Client you can even display a custom icon to represent the relation.
More in Canto’s blog: https://www.canto.com/blog/product-updates/cumulus-10-0-1-asset-relations-and-more/
Watch the video showing how it works.
—