Importing Media Files

Media Management supports a wide variety of media types, including:

File Size

The amount of time necessary to import a media file is in proportion to the size of the file. Large media files require more time to import than smaller media files. Try to import large media files when you have sufficient time to complete the task.

Note that you must save a GIF file as either a BMP, PNG, JPEG, or TIFF when importing. If your library uses media file types other than those in this list, contact Innovative to make those files types available to you. TIFF files are saved to the server in LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compressed format.

Follow these steps to import media files into a media set.

  1. Retrieve a bibliographic record.
  2. Choose the Media button from the toolbar.
  3. In the Media Manager window, create a new media set or navigate to an existing media set.
  4. At the bottom of the Display panel, choose the Import File button.
  5. In the Open dialog, select the media file you want to import and choose Open. You can import multiple files by holding down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, clicking on the file names, then choosing Open. Note that media files will display in the media set in the order in which you import them.
One File Type Per Media Set

While each media set can contain up to 99 images, all the images in a media set must be of the same file type. For instance, if an existing media set already contains a PNG file, you only can add a new media file that is also a PNG (or allow Media Management to convert the file to a PNG at the time of importing). This impacts the file types that appear in the Files of Type drop-down list in the Open dialog. Any file types that you cannot import into the selected media set (or that Media Management cannot convert) will not appear for selection in the drop-down list.

If you are importing one or more image files, Media Management will offer to convert the incoming files to the file type already contained in the media set. For example, if you try to import a TIFF file into a media set that already contains a JPEG image, Media Management will prompt About to change file <filename> from Tiff to Jpeg. Choose OK to convert the file's format and add the file to the media set, or choose Cancel to halt the process. If you want Media Management to automatically convert file types every time without prompting you, select the Don't give this warning next time check box.

If you have selected multiple files to import, and one or more of the files cannot be converted and added to the selected media set, Media Management prompts Could not import file <filename>, file is of type <file type> which is incompatible with field of type <field type>. You must create one or more new media sets to contain these media files.