Cool Digital Asset Management Tips – Part 2

Digital Asset Management Edit Muliple feature In a continuing effort to communicate with our customers, MerlinOne’s digital asset management workflow expert David Breslauer has been posting cool Merlin5 (M5) tips on our Facebook page. Below are some more tips he has posted. For even more tips become a fan of the MerlinOne Facebook page.

Merlin5 batch editing is cool.
In earlier versions of Merlin, only IPTC fields were available for batch editing. M5 supports batch editing of nearly every field (that should be editable). Accessing the batch edit function in M5 is as easy as selecting “Edit Multiple” from the Edit menu. Build the Edit Multiple dialog with any fields you would like to update, including fields you want to erase. Pick the field, pick appropriate operation (Prepend, Append, Replace) and enter or pick the field value. To erase a field, choose Replace as the function and leave the field value blank. An extra cool feature is to save often-used edit screens as templates to be quickly accessed.

Merlin5 Access to multiple servers is cool.
Did you know your M5 client software can be configured to access other Merlin digital asset management systems? At the login screen, hit the green “+” button to open a dialog box that allows you to set up access to another server. Once configured with the appropriate address, users may log into more than one Merlin at a time simultaneously using the File>New Connection menu item. For organizations with multiple instances of Merlin, it is easy to work with as many different Merlin digital asset management systems as practical.

Merlin5 Launch button is cool.
Want an easy way to open a document in Merlin, using the M5 client? Select the item or items and the click the “Launch” button, denoted by the rocket ship in the tool bar. The items will download to your local computer (assuming you have download privileges with your account) and will open in their default applications. To change a default application, so that photos open in the correct version of Photoshop and not an older version or in Preview (Macintosh) or Picture Viewer (Windows), download a similar item to your desktop, access its properties (usually a right mouse click on the item to get info or properties) and change the item’s default application. Be sure to select the “Use this application to open similar items” (or similar language).

Merlin5 integration with Trax is cool.
The M5 rich client now supports two-way integration with the Trax assignment management system. From the M5 File menu, navigate directly to “Today’s assignments in Trax” or click on the Trax icon (when highlighted), to navigate directly to the request in Trax. You can also now navigate back from Trax to the rich client. Trax is aware that the trip originated in M5, and when the “View in Merlin” link is clicked in Trax (when active) you are returned directly to the content that fulfills that request, even if it was submitted hours, days or even weeks apart.

Now that’s Cool!

Posted by Rande Simpson

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