A general approval workflow example

Learn how to configure a basic approval workflow for assets so that users of the DAM can only find and use assets that have been approved for use.

03. July 2026

Table of Contents

Overview

This topic covers configuring a workflow to approve assets for use. Regular users will only be able to see and use content that's been approved by the system manager. Uploaded content must be reviewed and released before users can access it. This is merely a demonstration workflow that can be expanded upon - the purpose of the example is to provide Fotoware users with some ideas for setting up their own system.

What we need

An action by which administrators can tag a collection of assets as approved or rejected
A search filter by which users will only be given access to view and work with assets that have been approved
Visual markers for convenience, so managers can easily see the approval state set on an asset.

Approval action

In the site settings, create an Extended Action with access only for the DAM managers group.

Configure it to modify the Source asset by displaying a metadata editor when it runs. Choose the field that should be updated (#203 approval state in the example below, but you can use any single entry field for this purpose).

Make sure the field is set to QL only, meaning that when using the action, the contents of the field can only be chosen from a preset list of entries in the taxonomy. When setting up the system, it makes sense to configure it with a logged-in user who has all administrative rights so you can also create taxonomy entries during testing.

Test run the action and create approval state taxonomy entries

Now, log on to Fotoware Veloz, select a few files in the archive, and test run the action:

Use the + button to create the three values we need for the approval state: Approved, Pending, and Rejected.

Then choose one of the values and run the action.

Filtering the archive by approval state

Open the archive access list and find the entry for your user group. As you can see in the entry below, we've added the part highlighted in blue to the existing auto search string for the DAM Users group:

(IPTC203 contains (Approved))

This will ensure that members of the DAM Users group see only assets with an explicit Approved tag set in field 203.

Visual markers for the approval state

The screenshot below shows the configuration of the marker that shows when an asset is approved. Having made this, you can clone it and create a marker for the rejected assets by changing the icon and setting the condition to Rejected.

The marker for assets pending approval is a little special because it needs to appear on assets tagged with Pending in the field in question (#203), as well as on assets for which no approval state has been set. This is accomplished by creating a condition based on a regular expression.

Learn more about regular expressions on Wikipedia - external link.

This is how you set it up - note the regular expression:

Visual result in the Fotoware grid

In the screenshot below, the highlighted markers indicate an approved asset (first thumbnail), a rejected asset (2nd), and an asset with pending approval (3rd). Note that this is what the system manager sees - regular users will only see approved assets based on the automatic search filtering we configured on the archive.