Sharepoint Image Library and Datasheet view
Is it called Picture Library or Image Library? I never remember. Well nevermind.
There are a lot of YASQs that relates to consitency. I've been caught in a trap frequently by customers because I've assumed that functionality in one place is also available in the next in Sharepoint. Today it was the "Edit in Datasheet" button that came into play.
The customer was organizing pictures in folders in a Picture Library (or was it Image Library?) and found pictures hard to categorize. The built in Slideshow feature did not seem to work very well with the folders, nor with other views. The slideshow feature will always display the entire contents of the picture library and does not pay respect to neither views (filters) nor folders, even though the link is displayed in the context of a view or a folder.
I initially recommended to discard the use of folders and use metadata columns instead. This allows for more advanced categorization of data than the hierarchical folder structure. In fact I recommend never making folders inside a document library, because sooner or later people are going to copy a document into several folders in order to "tag" it with the appropriate context information.
In fact they should "folder-enable" columns to auto-generate views grouped by the column instead of having folders at all.
Well, so we're moving all the files out of the folders and tagging them with metadata instead. That's a perfect task for the DataSheet View; just open the folder, switch to datasheet view, set the value in the first row (likely the folder name) and finally drag the Excell cell-copy-thingy downwards to apply the value to all rows.
There is no Datasheet view on the Image Library. This also implies that there is no easy way to apply metadata after you upload a batch of pictures (which you normally do). I tried applying all my FrontPage Magic by inserting the toolbar-button from a regular Document Library and re-wiring the List guids and all that stuff. Looked good, felt bad. No errors, but no datasheet view either.
My initial guess is that the Image library, much like the Form Library are "same, same but different" and that the regular rules don't not apply. If someone out there got this thing working please write about it, because noone else has. Otherwise; at least you don't have to spend a couple of hours deschiffring sharepoint ListViewXml as I just did (again).