How-to Guide on How It Works
Workflow
1. Getting Started
Sign Up, User Profile & Organization Setup
There is nothing to install. All you need is a Web browser and Internet connection.
Sign up, follow the instructions and get free GetArchive account, website, widgets and more!
User Profile, Collaborators, Invites
When you signed in, the first page you see is your User Profile.
Click on the pencil symbol to update your profile name, avatar, email and password. At the screen bottom, find a list of organizations where you are a member or an administrator.
To invite new members to an organization, you should have administrative access.
Organizations, Membership
To publish archives, you have to create or join existing organization. It can be your "personal" organization or a larger organization you are the member of. A user can be a member of multiple organizations.
Once you're done with your user account setup, in "Memberships" section, click Create Or Join Organization button or click on any of the organizations you are already a member of and proceed to the organization profile screen.
Organization Default META Data
ORGANIZATION PROFILE is where you can find and edit organization info, address, URL, add logo, cover and more.
To edit organization's defaults and invite new members to an organization, you should have administrative access.
DEFAULTS is a handy way to keep your account media and collections META Data consistent. It makes it easier to manage and organize. Defaults may include the name and address of your organization, default URL of your website, default historical period and default location name and geotag. Default values will be automatically assigned to every new object you or your team members upload.
Collaborators, Access Management
COLLABORATORS: The lists of users participating in organization's activities;
Administrators vs. Members:
There are two types of users roles: Administrators and Members. Your organization designates at least one person as the account administrator. Administrators can invite new collaborators to the team and assign user roles. Administrators can edit organization information and set up default organization's parameters such as default tags, geotags, and dates. Users with member status cannot change the default parameters. However, they may have full control of individual object tags, location/position, dates, and descriptions.
2. Uploading
Uploads, META Data, Slugs, Tags, Geotags and Dates
Uploads tab is where your organization members upload media files. To publish media (images), find the tab "Uploads" at the top of Organization screen.
GetArchive supports uploading in batches. The process is relying upon your browser's resources, so on older machines, we recommend to upload max 200 large image files (megabytes per image). For newer machines or smaller files, batches of 500+ files should cause no problems.
Your First Upload
On the Organization screen, click Uploads from the top menu, and you will see a screen like this.
Click "+" button, choose where from your files will be uploaded and follow instructions.
Videos. GetArchive can handle various media types. The most popular media type is image type. Videos should be hosted on YouTube. More media types and hosted videos will be added soon.
Upload Sources
GetArchive supports uploads from a local machine, from Dropbox and import Youtube video data.
GetArchive provides means to organize and manage video collections hosted on YouTube. Youtube videos are not counting towards your payment plan, so it's free to organize them.
Upload Dialog
When a user starts uploading your files, the user sees a screen like this:
Start Upload. Upload of images from local machine takes some time, depending on file size and Internet connection. Upload from Dropbox is much faster. Video "upload" takes no time since only YouTube META and links are imported.
Upload Complete
This screen shows Upload results. If some of your files failed to upload, they might be corrupt, or their names include non-standard symbols. Fix and re-upload.
Sometimes, if your computer is old, or your files are too large or too many, the process may stall. If it happens, cancel the upload, refresh the page and re-upload in smaller batches.
View Upload
When the upload is complete, the user can review it by clicking "View Upload." After clicking on "View Upload," the next screen looks like this one.
Click on any image to see the original image info (note that if your image had EXIF META Data embedded, the data from Image's Exif should be successfully imported).
Youtube video's Meta Data should be also imported automatically.
Now it's time to organize your archive by adding or editing META Data for uploaded files!
3. Meta Data
Titles, Summary, Tags, Geotags and Dates
A handy method to import objects META Data is to include your META into image's EXIF. EXIF is the wide-spread standard that allows metadata to be included in the image file. Modern digital cameras, including mobile phones, automatically add parameters such as date and geolocation into the image file when taking photographs.
When the user uploads images with EXIF information, GetArchive imports META data automatically. You can review and edit META data later. We recommend using EXIF to save user's time.
Tagging
A method to organize media is to add relevant tags. If object's information was included in imported image EXIF, and when importing YouTube videos, META Data such as tags and description should be already assigned to the imported media.
It can be done separately one by one imported object, or by use of mass edit actions.
Massive Tagging and META Data Editing
If your file came with EXIF META tags, it should be automatically imported. If there is nothing to import, the default organization values will be applied to all files in the upload.
Meta Data editing is 100% necessary but can be extremely time-consuming. To make this process a bit more pleasant, GetArchive allows massive tags and META Data adding and editing.
4. Slugs, Titles, Tags and More
Search Engine Optimization with use of META Data, Slugs, Tags, Geotags and Dates
Slugs are used as files permalinks as they help describe what the content of the media file.
A slug is a few words that describe a media object. If you choose to generate slugs automatically, the object's slug will be a URL friendly version of the object title.
Why Slugs?
GetArchive is designed to get your objects to be indexed by search engines. To achieve it, among other things, it tries to assign meaningful names to your files. The "slug" defines the name of the individual object file.
Objects without slugs cannot be published.
Upload cannot be published until all slugs are generated.
5. Publishing
Once you're done with META Data, it's time to publish!
To publish, click the "PUBLISH" button on the top right of the upload screen. It will prevent publishing if you are not finished with slugs.
6. Collections
Creating and sharing posts and collections is the best way to connect with your target audience!
Creating Collections
To begin, click the Collections tab on the header menu. On the Collections screen, click big "+" button to add a new collection. Type the collection name and short description.
Adding Objects to Collections
To add objects to collection click on "Upload" tab in the top menu.
Select files you want to add and click on the "collection" symbol to see and pick the collection from a list.
Finalizing Collection
Click on Collection in the list of collections and then, click on the "Gear" icon on the top right. Fill in the fields describing your collection:
The " Index Year" field is an approximate historical year for your collection.
7. Going Online
Your Archive Storefront(s)
Feature your archive on an Archive Storefront website and give your digital collections a place to shine. There are two ways to do it:
Classic: Hosted solution. Point your domain or subdomain to GetArchive-provided URL.
Viral: Insert a Collection or a whole Account into any web page or a blog with GetArchive Web Widgets. The Widget is great because it is an instant publishing solution.
Domain or Subdomain?
The chances are your organization already has a website. For example, you could create a subdomain on your site called " archives, " collections" or " images" that is accessible through the URLs like archives.yoursite.com, collections.yoursite.com, images.yoursitename.com, etc.
Setting Up Your Website
GetArchive provides you with a Canonical Name record (abbreviated as CNAME). To set up your website and get your archive storefront CNAME, click on "WEBSITE" tab, then click on "REGISTER" button and follow the instructions.
Connect Your Subdomain
To connect your domain or subdomain, login to your domain name registrar, create a subdomain if you did not create it yet, and connect it to the server name GetArchive provides you.