Search in Adobe plugin

One of the primary benefits of integrating Zoom into your workplace is the ability to search for files. Zoom has many features to allow you to search for items based on text strings as well as filter your search results to ensure you are getting the information that you are looking for.

 

Search Panel

Zoom 6.0 onwards, in the search tab, you would see a search icon within the box where you would type the phrase to search for. There are six buttons present in the top ribbon i.e Show in asset browser, Checkout, Make Link, Reveal in Finder, Refresh, Toggle View.

 searchPanel

 

Each button performs a different function which is described in the sections below.

Any type of search is only possible if you have set the default server in the Z-settings. Reload the Zoom plugin after that change.
 

Basic Search – “Search Everywhere”

The basic search or the global search looks for the input search string in file names, project names, authors, metadata property names / values, revision comments, etc.
When typing into the Global Search, for example, you might be searching for all files that have “nature”. We can do this by doing the following:

  1. In Plugin Panel click the search Tab.
  2. In the Search field, enter a term, for example, “nature”.
  3. Hit ENTER or RETURN on your keyboard.

The search results will now show up for you to browse. The results would be the same as when searched from the global search from the Asset Browser. Depending on the number of files in the system or your search term, you may have thousands of results, so you might want to refine your search results. Fortunately, Zoom has the tools to help you with that using Filters.

 

searchPanelWithResults

 

Configuring Basic Search

  1. Open zoom.properties file from $Home/.zm 
    For Example: C:\Users\joe\.zm\zoom.properties
  2. By default thumbnail, Name and Asset ids of the search results are shown in the search results. To show more metadata in the search results, PLUGIN_METADATA_TO_SHOW in zoom.properties has to be set.
  3. Add PLUGIN_METADATA_TO_SHOW followed by the metadata you want to display in your search panel. e.g. IPTC_City, FIPR_Application.
    zoom.properties
  4. Save the file.
  5. Click Reload on the Evolphin Zoom plugin panel to reflect the changes in the zoom.properties that you have made.

          reloadZoomProps

Structured Search – “Search Filename”

Users can click the toggle button to switch the view to Structured search. In here, particular files can be searched on the basis of filenames or by applying metadata filtering.

singleMetadatFilterAdvanceSearch

 

Configuring Structured Search

  1. Open zoom.properties file from $Home/.zm
    For Example: C:\Users\joe\.zm\zoom.properties
  2. Metadata based drop-down filters can be added in the Structured search view by adding LIST_DEF_PROPS followed by the metadata eg. IPTC_Copyright status
    zoom.properties
  3. Multiple drop-down filters can also be added in the structured search view by adding “,” separated values in LIST_DEF_PROPS.
    For example : LIST_DEF_PROPS = IPTC_Copyright status,IPTC_Rating

     multipleFiltersAdvaceSearch

  4. You can also set the default value that comes selected in the drop-downs automatically by adding the value separated by ‘|’ symbol.
    For example : LIST_DEF_PROPS=IPTC_Copyright status|Copyrighted 
  5. You can also filter your search results based on File-type filters already set up from the Asset Browser. For example, you may only want to see Images, or Videos, or Layouts, etc., each of these File-type filters can be configured by adding FILE_TYPE_FILTER in LIST_DEF_PROPS in zoom.properties.
    defaultFileTypeFilter
  6. This FILE_TYPE_FILTER will be available in both global and structured search views for filtering the search results.
  7. Save the file.
  8. Click Reload on the Evolphin Zoom plugin panel to reflect the changes made in zoom.properties.

          reloadZoomProps

Setting default search view

  1. The search tab has two views – Global search and Structured search.
  2. One of them can be made default by clicking on the settings button in the Evolphin Zoom panel and then choosing the desired option.

          defaultSearchSettings

Other buttons in the top ribbon

Show in Asset Browser:
  1. Select an Asset from the search results.
  2. Click show in the Asset Browser button.
  3. Asset Browser will be opened showing the particular asset.
Checkout:
  1. Select an Asset from the search results.
  2. Click the checkout button.
  3. If the default checkout location is set in Z-settings then the checkout will happen automatically, else a checkout dialogue will open.
  4. Choose the check-out destination in the checkout dialogue that opens.
  5. The asset will be checked out at the destination specified. 
Make Links:
  1. Select one or multiple assets from the search results.
  2. Make Links Button can also be clicked to make the links. You may also use drag and drop in Adobe Premiere.
  3. Links from search results can be made only for those assets for which a link icon is displayed beside the thumbnail of the asset.  Linkable
  4. The link icon will be displayed for those assets which are available on the local machine i.e in the working copy, in the auto-checkout path or in third party mount point paths.
  5. The path on the local machine is shown as the tooltip of the row in the search results.            Tooltip_path

Reveal in Finder:

  1. Select an asset from the search results.
  2. Click the reveal in finder button.
  3. If the asset is present on the machine i.e it is in the working copy, or in auto check out location or in third party mount point, a finder window will open revealing the location of that asset.
Refresh:

        Clicking the refresh button will refresh the search results.

Toggle View:

        Clicking the toggle button will toggle between the Global Search and Structured search.

 

Limiting search results

There may be cases when the search fetches thousands of assets which may make the search slow. So, by default, the plugin will load 100 search results, the most recently checked-in file appearing at the top. The no. of search results to be fetched can be configured from the plugin user settings, by clicking on the green settings button on the top-right corner of the panel. If you do not want to limit the number of results, set the Number of search items as ‘0’.

Plugin_Setting_btn
Plugin Settings button
Plugin_no_of_search_items
The setting for the number of search results

 

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