As covered in the Albums chapter, all content uploaded to SlideShowPro Director is housed inside a "Custom" album, which serves as a container for delivering content to slideshows, as well as applying metadata edits, sorting content, and other tasks. This section will cover the options available to you when editing content in SlideShowPro Director.
One of the more important concepts to understand when using SlideShowPro Director is the relationship between global and local content edits. With Director, you can manually assign metadata (like titles, captions, hyperlinks, etc) directly to an image or video, or you can assign metadata to all content in an album by setting up content metadata defaults. When created, metadata defaults are assigned to all existing (and future) content uploaded to the album. We'll discuss global versus local edits more below.
To see all assets uploaded to an album, click the "Content" link in the album's sub-navigation. Thumbnails for all your original images will be displayed. If the asset is a video, a default thumbnail signifying the video type ("FLV", "MOV", etc) will be shown as a placeholder graphic.
To perform basic edits on a photo or video, click on one. An edit bar will appear at the bottom of the browser window. It includes controls to make content active/inactive, rotate left/right, copy/move to another album, add tags, or delete. To edit more than one photo or video at the same time, hold down the Command (Mac) or CTRL key (Windows) and click on the file name of the first piece of content. Continue holding the key down and click on other file names to add them to the selection. If you'd rather select a range of content all at once, release the Command/CTRL key, press and hold the Shift key, and select the last piece of content within the range you want. To cancel your selection, click the "Clear selection" button or press the ESC key.
To edit all information associated with a photo or video, double-click on one. This opens an edit space for modifying the content's metadata (title, caption, hyperlink, and tags), assigning a focal point, overriding SlideShowPro's global Transition Pause parameter, and using the image as the preview graphic for the album. The area also displays the original file name, the dimensions, and the ID of the asset.
Any values entered here for title, caption and hyperlink override the global metadata settings (described above in "Global versus local edits"). When assigning a hyperlink, we recommend using absolute URLs ("http://") so that the URL assigned to the asset is always accessible regardless of where the slideshow content is embedded.
Every album allows you to assign a "preview" graphic that is used in SlideShowPro's gallery as well as Director's interface. You can use general slideshow content for the graphic, or upload a custom graphic and remove it from the album's content queue using the included options.
SlideShowPro will pause its slideshow on each image for the amount of time assigned to its Transition Pause parameter. This is a global setting that applies to all images it loads. SlideShowPro Director allows you however to assign a unique Transition Pause to each image, which will override the global value in SlideShowPro for the amount of time you enter. "0" is the default, which means that SlideShowPro's global value will be respected.
If the asset you're editing is an image, a button that looks like a target will appear underneath the image. This allows you to set the focal point for the image. Simply click the button, and drag the viewfinder that appears over your image to the area you want to keep "in focus" whenever Director publishes the image in cropped form (album previews, thumbnails, etc).