First let me say hello to the community.
I have just bought IMatch and am trying to understand how Locations are sorted and categorised. I have been looking for answers at photools.community and I Match Help but I am lost.
I have the following information under Metadata Location: Country, State/Province, City, Location.
However, under IMatch Standard Categories, Image Files, Location, I cannot see the photos sorted in the same way:
1. No information about State/Province
2. All locations loose the first capital letter
3. No possibility to create child categories
4. No possibility to drag and drop
Am I doing something wrong, or is there a way to overcome this?
Thanks
IMatch ships with a data-driven category named "Locations", on the same level like ISO or Camera Model.
Data-driven categories are a very poweful IMatch feature. They automatically categorize your images based on the metadata they contain. I highly recommend you read the corresponding help topic if you are new to IMatch.
In the case of the Location sample category you mention, they categorize your files by County, City and Location. No State is used to keep things tidy. The category also uses settings to make all country names upper-case, and the state and location lower-case. You can change this in the settings of the Location category. You can also change the category to use 4 levels (County > State > City > Location) if you like. As I said, IMatch data-driven categories are very flexile.
Read the help topic which explains how things work and then either change the sample Location category to match your preferences.
Right.-click the category and choose Advanced Commands > Data-driven Properties. Or click on the ... button in the property panel under the tree, in the row with the name Data-driven.
Good to know that is is possible to switch. However, could you help and tell me exactly which settings I need to change? I am asking these questions here because I have spent hours today trying to explore IMatch and I am stuck. I have read the huge amount of information in IMatch help under Data-driven Categories and elsewhere. And I have looked at Advanced Commands, Data-driven Properties, too. But this is very difficult to understand. I am a photographer, not a database expert.
In short:
- In the Categories view, click Locations
- Beneath the categories tree, choose the Properties tab
- If you select the property named Data-driven, you get a three dot icon on the right. Click it.
- You can now configure each level of the data-driven category to you liking. For example, Level 1 is based on the Country tag. The "Unify Spelling" option is set to "All upper case". If you want country to show exactly as entered, just switch this setting to "None"
But this is only for starters ;)
If you want to dive deeper, press F1 to get to the help.
To build on Thorsten's post, you'll want to set Level 2 (e.g., State), Level 3 (e.g, City) and Level 4 (e.g., Location). That will fill out the full data-driven category for locations.
As previously stated, data-driven categories (unique to IMatch) are very powerful and flexible!
Thanks, now I got it.