Assets Server sample plug-in - Photo usage report

Info: This plug-in is part of a set of sample plug-ins that is shipped with Assets Server. For more information, see Assets Server sample plug-ins.

Note: The use of internal plug-ins such as sample plug-ins has been deprecated in Assets Server 6.73. These plug-ins should instead be created as an external plug-in.

A common question for publishers: "What's the cost of the photos in the last issue?". In most cases, license costs for used photos have to be calculated by hand. To solve this problem, we've created a plug-in to give you an overview of all content used in a publication.

Note: This sample plug-in is available on Github. It will need further customization by one of our partners to make it suited for production use.

Report

Because the Assets Server automatically creates relations between archived InDesign files and used photos, it is easy to compile a clear list of content related to a publication. This plug-in looks for InDesign files and for each InDesign file it finds (or issue of a publication) it will list all images that are related to it.

There are two ways to open the plug-in. If you open the photo usage report directly, you will see all layouts available in the server in the report. You can also open the report on a selection in the search results to open the report specifically for the selected items.

In the plug-in you can see all images that are related to the layout, either by automagically created relations or by manually created relations. Every image shows it's metadata and if the images have a relation to the specific PDF they were used in, the page the image has been used on.

On every image entry there are two settings that are used for the photo usage report. You can use the used check box to indicate which of the related images have been used in the publication of the layout. If the layouts were archived using Studio Server, the check boxes for "used" will be filled automatically. The hide check box available to prevent certain repeating images, like logo's, from showing up in the report.

By toggling the check boxes at the top of the report you can modify the report to show either all related images, or only the used images. There's also the possibility to always show the images that have been set to hidden.

Certain metadata—copyright, usage fee and usage rights—can be edited directly in the plug-in.

Configuration

For gathering of all the publication assets for a given issue the following metadata fields are used in the example: publicationName, issueName and publicationDate. We use the metadata field usageFee to calculate the total price of an issue. Since the plug-in is open source, you can configure the plug-in to do any other calculation based on any other (custom) metadata field. This calculation is done in the JavaScript code in <plug-in>/index.html.

By modifying the index.html file of the plug-in, you can also change which metadata is visible for each issue or for each image in the report and the way it is displayed on the page.

The plug-in has a separate .css file to control styling, you can find this in <plug-in>/resources/styles.css.