Mapping thousands of images to their products and their positions is a long manual work. However, with Creative Force, this process can be done through automation. For the automatization to work, you will need to give specific instructions or guidelines which means that the auto-mapping requires the correct naming convention for the filename to be scanned correctly.

This article will provide you with the explanation behind the mapping logic and some suggestions in setting the file naming conventions.

Depending on your workflow setup, at the Photography step, you will see the options Pre-selection, Pre-selection by positions or Final Selection. With each option, Kelvin will have a different logic to automap the images to the products.

Note:

You can enable auto-map anytime you want and apply the functionality on existing products in the shot list.

If you have the Final selection set to take place in Gamma and you don’t check the box for Pre-selection by positions, you will get a general selection view in Kelvin.

With this option, Kelvin will map the images to a product by checking what is contained within the file name. If the barcode, product code or sample code is included in the filename, those files will be mapped to the scanned product.

In the below example, the product code is Auto_1, the file names are Auto_1 (1), Auto_1 (2)... and so on. All will be mapped to product Auto_1 because the filenames contain the product code.

With this option, Kelvin will look for the exact filename match to map the files to its corresponding position. This means that, Kelvin will search for the filename according to the asset naming convention you have set up on your Style Guides.

Note:

You cannot use the following merge fields in the asset output name: “Recurrence Index”, “Date”, “Datetime”, “Position Sequence Number”, “Production Sequence Number” and “Sequence Number”. Sample code should not be used in this instance as Creative Force only assigns the sample code to a product once the Photography step is done.

For example, below we have the product code BuildViaScan_2. For automap to work, the filename must follow the convention %productcode_1, %productcode_2 which translates to BuildViaScan_2_1 and BuildViaScan_2_2.

However, in Kelvin, my filenames are BuildViaScan_2 (1), BuildViaScan_2 (2), BuildViaScan_2_a, BuildViaScan_2_b, therefore, the images cannot be mapped to the positions, they can only be mapped to the product.

As soon as you change the filename according to the style guide’s set up, you will see that the file is mapped.