As a solution, we’ve created a simple, yet powerful update process to help you quickly update metadata across all your media in the Subsplash Platform.
Basic Info
The available editable fields (columns) are Title, Subtitle, Additional Label, Date, Speaker, Topic, Scripture, Summary, and Published (yes/no). Any information or content beyond these fields will need to be edited within the Dashboard. As of 7-27-21 the updates to the Additional Label field will be disabled, the field will remain in the dashboard for now but we encourage you to move any information in that field into one of the new tags fields. See below for the step-by-step!
1. Click here to navigate to the Bulk Import/Edit page within your Subsplash Dashboard and you will see a section to Edit media in bulk, found at the bottom of the page.
2. To get started you will download a file of the current media items that you have uploaded to Subsplash. You can optionally set a date range (based on upload date) of items to retrieve. Once you have your date range entered, click the Download .CSV button and your file will begin downloading.
3. Once downloaded open that file using either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. That file will display any metadata currently attached to those media items. If no information was found, the cell will be blank.
Note: Do not edit the column labeled “subsplash id (do not edit)”. This is the ID that we use to match the right metadata with the right media item.
4. Now begin adding your metadata to the right files! There are some restrictions to the upload, specifically around the date format and what special characters we support. See "Common Issues" below for additional information.
Note: When entering metadata into the tag fields (Topic, Speaker, and Scripture), tags can include one or multiple words separated by a space. You can include up to 3 speakers, 10 topics, and 5 scriptures within Media items. To do so you will need to ensure to use a separator (|) between each desired tag or you can choose to avoid separating tags by using (\|) between words.
For topics, we recommend using a simple structure of single-word tags (e.g., Faith, Hope, Love) rather than creating more complex tagging structures using / or - between words. Also, keep in mind the limits:
100 total Topic tags
30-characters per tag
For speakers, we recommend naming each speaker separately (e.g., 'John Doe', 'Jane Doe', rather than 'John & Jane Doe'). Speaker limits:
30-characters per tag
For scripture, you can use either the normalized book titles and spacing (e.g. Matthew 1:1-2) or the OSIS format. For OSIS, at this time we support book, chapter, and verse in the ID, and we support both ID and Refs. When including ranges in your metadata, we don’t support book ranges but do support chapter and verse ranges. For detailed information refer to pages 88-91 and 123 of the OSIS User Manual
Tip: If you have used the Additional Label field in the past for adding scripture, just copy and paste from the Additional Label column to the Scripture column and you'll be good to go!
To read more about tagging check out this on How do I add tags to my Media Items?
5. Once you have made all the changes, save your changes to that file on your computer and then upload that in step 2 “edit and upload”. This can be found under → Media → Bulk Import/Edit.
6. Once this is done, edits in the dashboard are ready immediately and updates to search indexes take up to 1 hour" to "Once the upload is complete, all the updates you've made will be immediately available in the Dashboard, but will take up to 1 hour to propagate out to search indexes, native apps, and websites.
Media Series Organization
While bulk import gets all the media upload to the Dashboard, organizing it is often the next big task. Bulk edit can help with this process with a few additional steps in the spreadsheet.
There are two columns you will need to add to your spreadsheet to get set up, be sure they have the same titles:
The "series" column will be the title of the Media Series in the Dashboard that you want the item to be in. Make sure the Media Series exists in the Dashboard before you upload the CSV and that the title matches exactly.
The "position in series" is the order of the items within the series. This is a numerical digit 1-200 with 1 being the bottom of the series.
Once you have the information in the spreadsheet, follow steps 5 and 6 above to export the spreadsheet as a CSV and upload it to the Dashboard.
If you forget a series or position number, don't worry, you can repeat the upload process as many times as you would like until it's in the desired order.
Common Issues:
Update failed due to size:
If the update fails because it’s too big or took too long, the spreadsheet can be split up into multiple pieces (multiple CSV's) as long as the headers are copied to those other spreadsheets.
Could not find media item with id: {{id}}
We need to put our subsplash_id in the .CSV so we can identify the media-item on upload. This is the master ID that is used to unite the edits with the correct media item. If this was removed, the upload will not work! If you have accidentally done this, no problem. The next step is to re-download the data, apply edits again (without touching the subsplash_id), and re-upload.
Could not update media item, please try again
This will happen when there is a temporary problem with our internal server or DB. This should be rare! The next step would be to try to upload the error .CSV with no edits.
Date format is not correct (yyyy-mm-dd)
This will happen when the date entered is not in the yyyy-mm-dd format. We do provide the date format in the header of the date column and also in this error. The next step is to fix the date format and resubmit the error .CSV file.
Something went wrong, please try again
This is our standard message on the Front End. This can happen for a variety of reasons but the next step is to try to upload the originally edited .CSV again.
Scheduled to publish Media Items become un-scheduled
When the CSV is downloaded from the dashboard any media items that are scheduled to publish will hold the value "future" in the published column. If this is changed to "yes" or "no" it will override the scheduled time of the media item. Scheduling to publish a media item must still be done within the dashboard, any items that have the value of "yes" or "no" cannot be changed to "future".