Categories help to organize images in Cumulus. Categories are basically just keywords the images are assigned to. They remind us of a folder structure. They support the organization of images in a meaningful way, but can also serve as a workflow for not yet finished records. Finally, they should provide the end customer, who accesses the catalogue via the (public) frontend, with a first overview of what can actually be found.
The number of categories, like the metadata fields, depends on the depth of cataloguing and the available resources. It is best to work with a rough structure at the beginning, which then gets refined over time. The structure of the categories is straightforward, they can be created and moved around at any time.
With the help of so-called triggers it is possible to write the categories (i.e. their name) into metadata fields. This way, the information does not have to be catalogued twice, for example, if there are categories with the names of photographers (with a trigger the metadata field "photographer" or "author" is filled automatically).
