Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker
Galleries are visual lists that can hold references to records in your catalogues without having to duplicate or move actual files. You can think of them as baskets, like playlists in iTunes. Any single record can appear in more than one gallery. Removing a record from a gallery does not remove it from the catalogue (there are some exceptions to this point of which more later, below).
Galleries can be used for tasks such as keeping track of frequently accessed files, like logos, or files related to a project you're working on. There are several types of galleries:
Because galleries are so useful it's easy to assume you should use them for categorization of content. However, this is a task better left to keywords and custom fields. Note that gallery names are not searchable in Finds, so if you put all of your mammal image records in a 'Mammals' gallery, you will have to manually find and click that gallery in the gallery pane rather than just use the QuickFind to search for Mammals, had you also applied a 'Mammals' keyword to the records; for a more complex query you could use a (saved) find but the same principle applies.
Extensis recommend that you only use galleries to keep track of projects on which you are currently working. The Galleries pane is a 'flat' list, meaning you can't put one gallery inside of another ('nesting' them like OS folders). By comparison, Portfolio's Folder Sync folders or Categories are nest-able and serve as a better way to organize content in a taxonomy or hierarchy. If you have a need for many saved finds, use the saved finds palette instead, rather than being tempted to make each into a smart gallery.
As the number of galleries in your catalogue increases, the opening time of your catalogue will also increase. The same goes for Smart Galleries, the more you have the longer the catalogue will take to open. This is because Portfolio validates the content of each gallery at when the catalogue is opened. Performance can also be affected by the number of records in a gallery. Galleries will perform best when the contents of a gallery are less than a few hundred records. If you have thousands of records in a gallery or if you try to select and drag thousands of records to a gallery it may take several seconds to perform this task. Under general working conditions a catalogue with 50,000 records will perform well if you keep the number of saved galleries to 50, Smart Galleries to five and the maximum number of records per gallery to 500. You shouldn't normally require large numbers of scratchpad galleries so these shouldn't be a significant factor.
Note: this article is based on and exteded from Extensis' KB article #4902210.
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Question: How many (Smart) Galleries can I use? (v7+) [FAQ00383.htm]
Last Update:- 04 October 2006
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