Families - an inroduction
Applies to: Details Mode
Version 4.2 introduced a new data entity in Details Mode - Families.
With families, subjects from different home folders can be brought together into a 'family'. Images such as group photos can be matched to the family. Speciality products containing both the group image and individual subject images can be created for the family. When ordering online, all family images can be viewed together.
Families in relation to folders
The grouping of subjects into folders has long been an established practise in Details Mode. In school photography subjects are normally grouped into folders per class, teacher or grade. In sports photography subjects are often grouped into folders per team or coach.
Folders allow the user to accomplish many production tasks such as
- Order products such as ID cards en masse for each folder
- Form composite group photographs and traditional named group photographs
- Sort print queues according to folder for ease of packaging and delivery
- Exporting data and images grouped by folder for the purposes of yearbook and CD production
- Form speciality 'group' based products such as memory mates by matching team or group images to the folder
Families are essentially a special folder
With families, subjects can be grouped into folders in addition to the main folder grouping as described above. Some examples of the use of families in a typical school photography scenario include
- A family in the traditional sense of the word - grouping siblings!
- Families for each of the school's sports teams
- A family that includes the school captains
- Families for miscellaneous groups such as music groups etc
Figure 1: A collection of families - showing members of the Jones family
Why use families instead of just creating extra folders?
Consider the following typical scenario in school photography.
You are asked to photograph three siblings all from the one family. Each sibling is in a different folder/class/grade/teacher
Typically photographers handle this situation by creating a new subject, "Smith family" for example, and matching the sibling photographs to this subject.
- While this approach is quite valid,
creating a family entity rather than a new subject means the
software 'knows' about the relationship between the individual
subjects together with any images that may be matched to the family
itself. Because of this relationship families offer many advantages
not available with normal folders
- A family behaves both as a single subject as well as a folder. Orders may be placed for the family entity as if it were a single subject
- Speciality (including collage type) products containing the 'family' photo together with individual subject (sibling) images
- Ability to view and order online for all family members at once
- Sorting of print queue to print family orders together with sibling orders
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