Cumulus Automation

[FlipFriddle]

If anyone out there is using Cumulus, maybe you can help me out. As anyone who has used Cumulus knows, if you are doing your image importing over a network it is pretty slow. My idea is to dedicate a machine to do the importing process and have it all run by scripts, so it doesn't need to be touched. Basically what I want to do is created some folders for new images on our file servers. The upload machine then watches those folders; when someone places new images in the folders the upload machine activates a script that tells Cumulus to import all of the images in that folder to a given directory in the Cumulus database. Then when the Cumulus admin logs in later they can go to the New Uploads directory and begin categorizing and organizing the new images. Any ideas if this is possible?
Thanks.

[danedawg99]

I know that the first part is possible, since that's how we do it here (watched folders and all that). I don't know about the second part, but I would think that it could be done.

Good luck!

[FlipFriddle]

Does that involve the auto-cataloging feature? I just read about that in the manual. I haven't been able to get it to work right yet.
Glad to know someone has this working though.

[danedawg99]

I think so. To be honest, I don't know much about it, we use it here to place photos in ads, but I don't know how they have it set up. I know they have watched folders for art and photos, and if you put a photo is them, they'll show up in cumulus. It's like magic! :D

[FlipFriddle]

I think I figured it out after an email to Canto Tech Support. It is the auto-cataloging feature. It was a bit convoluted to figure out, but I got it to work. The wierd thing was, it appears that Cumulus is set internally on Greenwich Mean Time. I tried testing the feature and could not understand why it wouldn't start when I told it to. While poking around in the Information dialog I found out that the time there was set 4hrs ahead of where I am (Eastern USA). I guess it's just four hours now since British Summer Time hasn't started yet, though I could be wrong. Anyway once I got the "correct" time entered in the auto-cataloging I noticed that it worked.

Now if only I could get our Cumulus Administrator to do this stuff instead of me; all I want to do is USE it :)