Making Asset Collections

Mixing Assets from Different Species
 

As well as directly comparing two species side by side with two browsers (see How to Compare Species), you can mix the assets of several species in a single browser page.

Click the Toggle Link to Browser button in the navigators toolbar. This prevents the browser automatically updating with the assets of the selected species.

Click the Thumbnail View button in the browser toolbar so we can view multiple assets.

Click the Clear button in the browser toolbar to remove any current assets.

Select the first species of interest in the navigator. Click on one of the assets you are interested in and drag it over to the browser and release it. The asset thumbnail will appear in the browser.

Now select a second species of interest in the navigator and drag one of its assets over to the browser. Continue with this for all the species and assets that you wish to view together.

The example above shows a collection of assets comparing Skylark, Woodlark and Short-toed Lark.

You can add a title to your collection of assets: right-click (Mac: command-click) above the assets (where the species name would normally appear) and select Edit Title.

Select Save Snapshot As from the File menu to save a copy of the current browser display for future reference - it can be reloaded at any time by selecting Open Snapshot (see Taking Snapshots of the Browser for details).

Presenting your Asset Collection as a Slide Show
 

You can present a collection of assets as a slide show. This can be the assets of a selected species or one of your own composites of assets from several species - see Mixing Assets from Different Species.

Either select a species in the navigator or load a previously saved snapshot of a collection of assets (see Taking Snapshots of the Browser for details).

Click the Thumbnail View button and ensure the assets are in the correct order that you want them to be displayed in. You can drag and drop the asset thumbnails around the browser and remove unwanted assets to reposition them. Set the Zoom Slider to maximum if you want to show the assets without a species title. Alternatively set it to any other position if you want to see the assets with their species title.

If you don't want the asset caption bar displayed, click the Toggle Captions button.

Select full screen mode and double-click on the first asset thumbnail to view it. Use Ctrl+Left arrow and Ctrl+Right arrow (Mac: Command+Left arrow and Command+Right arrow) keys to move through your collection of assets as a slide show.

You can exit out of full screen mode at anytime by pressing Esc or Ctrl+O, or by right-clicking (Mac: Command+O or Command-click) in the browser area and selecting Exit Fullscreen from the menu.

Adding your own Notes to Species

You can add your own notes to species collections (e.g. notes of past sightings, or your own additional observations and identification tips) as follows:

Click the Notes button, or select Features, Notes, or press Ctrl+T (Mac: Command+T).

A Notes window opens - type whatever text you want into the box. If you want to "lock" your Notes (to prevent accidental changes), right-click (Mac: Command-click) on the Notes asset and select Edit Disable from the context menu that pops up. To "unlock" previously locked Notes, right-click (Mac: Command-click) and select Edit Enable from the context menu.

If you prefer you can also add your own short notes to entries in a Navigator - see Editing a Navigator - this does not entail creating new Notes assets.

Adding your own Assets to Species
 

The following information shows how you can integrate your own assets into the product. Please note that this feature is currently intended for advanced users and is not supported by BirdGuides Technical Support at present. However, it is envisaged that future releases of BirdGuides products will provide extended support for this functionality.

Select one of your own photo JPG images that you want to add to an existing species - let's say a Dipper.

Locate and select the Dipper species. Click on the Information button in the Features Toolbar to display the asset information dialog. Lookup the entry for the File name under the Technical section and make a note of the Species Identification Number (SID) - this is always the 6 digit number at the start of the filename and should be 126001 for the Dipper.

Using Windows Explorer, browse to the species update folder and (unless it already exists) create a new subfolder corresponding to the SID. In our example this will be folder \Updates\Data\Species\126001. Save your picture in the new folder, with a suitable name such as 126001_U001_Dipper.jpg (we use U001 to indicate user-added asset 1). Alternatively, if you have copied the program data to the hard drive you can save the image in the existing species folder under the primary data path (see How to Change the Species Data Location).

If the DVD-ROM is already running, move to another species and then back to Dipper (if not, just run the problem and navigate to the Dipper assets). You will see that our photo now appears in the asset set for the Dipper!

Notice however, that there is no descriptive information for our new asset and it only appears in the navigator asset selector with its file name as a caption. We will now add the asset captions and information for our picture.

To do this we must create an associated asset XML file. The best way to achieve this is to copy an existing asset XML file and edit it, say 126001_P701_Dipper.xml.

Copy this file from the \Species\126001 folder of your primary data area (see How to Change the Species Data Location) to the \Updates\Data\Species\126001 folder and rename it to match our own asset, i.e. 126001_U001_Dipper.xml. Open the file in an XML editor (you can use Notepad on Windows systems) and locate the areas highlighted in the example below.

Modify the asset File Names to that of our asset. Edit the Caption to something appropriate and update the Copyright and Information sections accordingly making sure you set Asset Type to "foto". If there are any entries in the Annotations section, remove them.

We hope to extend this functionality further in future BirdGuides releases.