This article is a primer re supplier management and the difference between suppliers and contributors.
Recommended reading
- Recovering deleted files
- Suppliers, Supplier groups, Contributors and User accounts
- Linking files to suppliers
- Configuring restrictions on supplier files
- Displaying rights, releases and restrictions
- Contributor registration
- Contributor uploads and the submission queue
- Contributor profile pages
- Data processing rules
- Payment runs / Sales reports
Introduction
All the media files (photos, videos et cetera) in your XS database must be linked to a supplier record. Within the XS system, suppliers are for example photographers. Every supplier is part of a group. Groups are generally affiliate agencies that you represent, but also your own business. You can also create supplier groups to automatically apply different settings to new suppliers that are added to the different groups, and to automatically apply content related properties to the metadata of files from your suppliers. You can also create data processing rules for files from suppliers within a specific group only, or for files from everyone except for suppliers in a specific group.
When a supplier record is linked to a user account, then the supplier is referred to as a Contributor. For a further explanation about the difference between Suppliers and Contributors, please read Suppliers, Supplier groups, Contributors and User accounts
To read in detail about the process of automatically linking files to suppliers, please the article Linking files to suppliers.
Working with supplier groups
Go to Supplier management and click Add group at the top of the page. On the first tab sheet enter a name for the new group. The different tab sheets let you configure default settings for suppliers in the group. There are defaults for content uploaded by / from suppliers, and there are defaults for the supplier records. Note that these settings are defaults only and that you can override settings for each individual supplier. You can also apply new settings to all suppliers in a group which is explained further down in this article.
Settings
The Settings tab sheet has defaults for new content – i.e. these settings are used for new files entering the system only – and it has a number of properties that are effective immediately. The latter means that changes to such settings are visible on the client facing website for all content of all suppliers in the group, without the need to reprocess file metadata.
Royalties
The Royalties tab sheet lets you configure default settings re the supplier percentage, the payment periodicity in months, and a payment threshold. You can find more information about these settings in the article Payment runs / Sales reports.
Contributor defaults
This tab sheet lets you configure default settings for “Contributors”. Contributors are suppliers that are linked to user accounts. Suppliers don’t have to be contributors. This is only necessary if you want e.g. photographers to be able to upload files and/or edit their own file metadata and so on. Contributors can have their own profile pages. This is described in detail in the article Contributor profile pages.
Rights Managed / Royalty Free content settings
You can assign any of the RM and RF configurations (File collections and download sizes) that you have set up to each individual supplier. Generally speaking, these settings will however be the sames for all suppliers in a group in which case you can simply set this up for the group. All suppliers will then automatically use the group’s defaults.
Territorial restrictions
The Territories tab sheet lets you select countries where content of suppliers in the group may not be sold. E.g. this may be the case if you represent an agency, but you may sell the content in your own country only. In that case you can select your own country and then click the radio button Only available in. If you can sell content anywhere except in a few countries, then select those countries and change the radio button to Not available in. You can override the group’s settings for specific suppliers in a group by clicking the Territories button in the Supplier management overview.
Syndication import
You can syndicate files to third parties (outbound) which is described in detail in the article Syndication. The settings on this tab however have to do with automatic importing of files syndicated by other parties to your database. You can configure how to link such files to suppliers and whether or not the system should automatically create new suppliers when necessary. It is furthermore possible to configure rules to reject files based on certain words or codes in the file data.
Copying settings to all suppliers in a group
If you make changes to settings of a supplier group, these settings will not affect suppliers already in the group. You can however apply the group’s settings to all the suppliers in the group. To do this, open the group properties and select the tab sheet that has the settings that you want to apply, i.e. Settings, Royalties, or Contributor defaults. On each of these tab sheets you’ll see a button Apply above details to all in this group. Note that clicking this button changes the supplier’s in the group, it doesn’t save any changes you made to the group’s settings. To save such changes, simply click the Save button at the bottom of the Group dialog.
