How to Setup Photo Tasks Inside Arc XP

Under your name in the upper right corner, select "Company" and click on "Tasks". Create a Task Type that is called "Photo Assignment" or something similar. This is to communicate what the action for this task will be. Make sure you check "Photo Center" as the Authoring App. Within this Task Type, you will also be able to add additional fields for these tasks. These fields will show up as additional information within the task when assigned. Some suggestions would be Contact Name, Contact Phone Number, Location, etc. See Use WebSked Tasks to Streamline Your Workflow for more general information about tasks.

You may also want to create a Task Template for this Task Type, which will allow you to pre-fill some of the task information. For notifications:

Step 1 - Create the story you would like to associate the images with. This could be as little as a working headline, depending on your organization’s required fields. Once you click Save from the Planning tab and move to the Compose tab, click on the "file box" icon on the right side and click create new task.

Step 2 - Create a new task using your "Photo Assignment" Task Type, fill in all relevant information and click "task create". This will create the task and alert the proper folks on your photo team (depending on your notification setup above).

Alternatively, you can also use Workflow Status changes to trigger Task Assignments such as this one. In that case, the action that triggers the creation of the task is different, but the task that is created would be the same "Photo Assignment," and the remaining steps of the workflow would remain the same. For more information on this alternate way of generating tasks, refer to our guide on Task Triggers.

Step 3 - The task has been assigned and a photographer wants to respond to the Photo Assignment task. Once they have the photos they would like to associate with that story, they open the task and copy the unique ID from the "Task ID" field and add it to the metadata of the photos. The task can be found by clicking on the notification link in Slack or email, going into WebSked and looking at the tasks field, or by clicking on the task inside the Composer story.

This Task ID association can be done before the photo is added to the system, using something like Photo Mechanic and adding it to the IPTC field "Job ID" field. Photo Center extracts any job identifier/transmission reference values it finds from this IPTC field and adds them to a new field called "Job Identifier (IPTC record in Arc)." You can also add the Task ID in the Photo Center UI in the "Associated Tasks" field.

If you are bringing in multiple photos this way, remember to click the Copy to all button below that field to give all photos the same ID.

Step 4 - Once the person from the photo team has uploaded those photos with the associated Task ID, Photo Center will automatically create a Lightbox with that Task ID as the title. Any photos with that metadata will be automatically added to that Lightbox, so you can add that ID to other photos and they will automatically appear in the Lightbox as well. If you add a photo to that Lightbox in the Photo Center UI, it will be associated with that task.

Step 5 - Back in Composer, you will now see that when you add a photo to the story, instead of showing you the entire library, you will first be shown this associated Lightbox. You can still click on the "Images" tab at the top to see the full library of photos, if the photo you are searching for is not part of that Lightbox.