Using

The interface of the application is divided in different tabs that represents perspectives. Depending on your user rights you will have access to some of this perspectives. Some of the perspectives are document base contextual, that is to say you can have access to it for a document base and not for another one. You could switch from one base to another by using the list at the upper right corner, you can only select base for which you have a role on.

This perspective is visible to application global administrators, it's used to modify users, base of documents, and to give to some users the role of document base administrator.

Before anything can be done a global administrator must create bases of documents. It's better to take the time to create this bases as the system is not yet designed to allow transfer of documents between bases. A document base is totally independent from another one that is to say every entity defined in a base (people, documents, locations) will be only visible in the context of this base.

A probably good choice is to create a base for your family pictures, a base for your friends pictures, and a base for your trips pictures and documents (if you travel a lot you can create a base for each continent).

This perspective is visible to users that can administrate the current document base. It allows to edit document base authors (users that can add add and edit elements of the base), viewers (users that can consult the base content), and edit the saved base searches.

This perspective is used to fill the base with contents, it is accesible to document base authors.

Before adding documents to the base, it's important to well define the entities that will be used to caracterize the documents. As it's more convenient to add well defined documents, than to edit all the documents added afterward.

Locations The locations reprensent's a geographic area, they are used to localize some documents do it's easy to find out which pictures were taken in Paris for example. They are also used for displaying map containing little markers reprensenting documents, so you can see on a map all the pictures you took during your trip to Argentina.

The process of defining the location is quite painfull, but when you're done all the documents you add can be easily localized.

The locations are represented as a tree, for example if you travelled to Africa and created a document base for your pictures taken in Africa you may want to change the default created parent location (which represent's the earth) to Africa, and then create sub-locations like saharian area, south africa .... You can be as precise as you want, it will take much time but will be nicer when displaying your documents on a map. For example if you just create a location Africa, all your documents will appear at the center of Africa, if you're more precise some will appear at Nairobi, others at Dakar.

To create a location, you have to enter a name, and optionnally somme coordinates (used for maps), the coordinates are the latitude and longitude of the south west point of the area, and the latitude and longitude of the north east point of the area. To obtain the coordinates for a given point you can click on the little icon representing a calculator, enter an address and you'll get the coordinates of the point (depending on the country). Another way of doing it is to use google maps and to navigate to the point you want the coordinates of, double click on it, and then click on link to this page at the upper right of the map, part of the url displayed in your navigator bar will look like ll=45.890008,-94.306641 these are the latitudes and longitude of your point, it seem's really painfull but it's not so and it allows you to visualize the point.

Events An event can be a trip, a birthday, it's composed of a name, a starting date, and an ending date, and a location. It allows you to quickly find out all the pictures of your christmas 2006 trip to Oregon.

People These are the people, that will caracterize a document (for example persons that appears on a picture, persons that are figures of a book), or that created the document (photograph, writer).

It can be useful to add an "unknown" person to represents the poor soul you're memory forgot.

Keyword The keywords allow you to tag documents with arbitrary words, for example "funny".

Adding documents Finally ! You can add documents, to the base.

To add documents, you can either pick up a file from your hard drive and add it has a document. Or pick a a zip file to add as documents all the files contained in the zip (preferred way when adding a lot of documents). Either way you will be forwarded to the screen that let's you set the attibutes of your document, and you're done !

In this perspective you can view all the documents of your base, search for them by any criteria, saved your searches for quickly run again a search (it's like a virtual collection of documents), browse locations you created to view a map containing your documents, and in the future print your documents (this is not really working yet), and send documents by e-mail.