Learn the difference between Append, Overwrite, Remove and Clear Field of a Property

When multi editing assets you get an option when adding metadata if you want to Append, Overwrite, Remove or Clear Field of a property. This article explains the difference between them and how they work.

Within your QBank you will be able to utilize and display different types of properties.  Depending on the property type, certain function will be available to you.

As a general rule you can apply the following: 

• If the property is Keywords or List --> Append, Overwrite, Remove or Clear Field will be available
• If the property is Dropdown --> Overwrite or Clear Field will be available

The "Append" option

Follow these steps to use the append option:

1. Select several assets of your choice
2. Click on the Edit button or right-click and choose edit
3. Select a property, choose the "Append" option and add values to your properties
4. Click save and all your values will be added to each selected asset

Append would simply add values to a given keyword/list property. In the following example, we selected 3 assets and added the keywords "New York", "Buildings", "Architecture" and "Flat Iron"

As you can see the four Keywords are now available on our 3 selected assets.

The "Overwrite" option

Follow these steps to use the overwrite option:

1. Select several assets of your choice
2. Click on the Edit button or right-click and choose edit
3. Select a property, choose the "Overwrite" option 
4. Click save and all your values will be overwritten (replaced) with the new inserted values.

Overwrite would replace the older values with the new selected values of a given keyword/list property

As you can see, we have replaced four keywords with two keywords values, and now all the selected assets are showing the two keywords values (and removed all our previous value from the Keyword field).

The "Remove" option

Follow these steps to use the remove option:

1. Select several assets of your choice
2. Click on the Edit button or right-click and choose edit
3. Select a property, choose the "Remove" option
4. Click save and all your selected value(s) will be removed.

Remove would simply remove a value from the list/keyword property

We can remove a single value or several values using the "Remove" function via multi-edit.

The "Clear Field" option

Follow these steps to use the Clear Filed option:

1. Select several assets of your choice
2. Click on the Edit button or right-click and choose edit
3. Select a property, choose the "Clear Field" option 
4. Click save and all your values will be removed within the selected field

Clear Field would remove all values from a given property keywords/list, but the property would remain, it would simply have no values in it. 

In this example we will choose assets that have some values in the Keywords (on the second screenshot, we can see 6 keywords suggested so we have a total of 6 values incorporated in 3 different assets). 

We successfully removed all values of our keywords property on all the selected assets. 

Tip:

The multi-edit view is very flexible

When you are entering the Multi-Edit view, you can fine-tune your selection after clicking the edit button and make another selection within your initial selection.

• On Mac you can use the "Command" key to select several assets of your choice while holding the key "Command", On PC you can hold the "Ctrl" Key
• Hold the "Shift" key on Mac or PC if you'd like to select several assets in a row. 

See the screenshot below