Choosing system activity and metadata to log for use in your reports (deprecated)

Acivity logging is central in getting FotoWeb to include the right types of information in your reports. Learn how to enable logging of events to create meaningful reports.

29. April 2025

Table of Contents

Logging events Search activity is always logged Logging metadata Including newly created fields in reports A note about the standard reports Using Google Analytics to track site navigation

Note: The FotoWeb Reports module/Fotoware Custom Report Generator tool is deprecated and will be set to End of Life on April 1st, 2024.

Note: This article describes functionality available in feature release 17 and earlier. For a description of this functionality in release 8.1 and onwards, see Configuring site behavior.

FotoWeb always writes logs to the connected database. It also writes asset metadata to the database based on the fields you choose to include. Learn how to configure logging of events so you can create meaningful system reports.

Event and metadata logging is configured in the FotoWeb site configuration. Go to the Settings tab, expand the Behavior group, and choose the Logging node.

Logging events

To choose which events to log, tick the corresponding box in the list of Events. If you would like to reduce the amount of event logging, you can remove the checkmark next to the events that you want to avoid logging.

Search activity is always logged

As you can see from the choice of events to log in the screenshot above, search is not listed. That's because all search activity is always logged. This cannot be disabled. Logging of searches works as follows:

If you search in a single archive in the FotoWeb Pro interface, a single search activity is logged
If you search in ALL archives in the FotoWeb Pro interface, one search activity is logged per archive
If you search in a single archive in the standard FotoWeb interface, one search activity is logged for the currently selected archive
If you search in ALL archives in the standard FotoWeb interface, one search activity is logged for the first archive that contains hits that the user has access to. That archive is the one shown right after the search is performed
If you search in ALL archives in the standard FotoWeb interface and there are no hits in all archives, NO search activity is logged.

Logging metadata

Certain metadata fields will also be logged alongside events. You can choose to add more metadata fields as you require, or you can remove fields if you'd like to keep that information out of the logs.

Including newly created fields in reports

If you've created completely new metadata fields in the XMP configuration, follow the points below to make them available for use in the reports module:

Create a new metadata field in Metadata Configuration and save the configuration.
Restart FotoWeb.
Restart your web browser and reload the Site Settings page in the Operations Center.
Enable logging for the new metadata field in Settings / Logging.
Enable logging for event Metadata Edit OR Download OR Upload.
Add the new metadata field to the metadata set of an archive.
If upload is selected for logging, make sure Preserve metadata left empty during upload is enabled.
If metadata edit is not selected for logging, perform another event that is, such as download/upload.
Use FotoWeb to add metadata to the field in question so there is data to process in the report.
Run a report (same which you run).
Refresh the browser window.
Edit custom report.
Open columns option on the right-hand side - the new field is now available for inclusion in the report.

A note about the standard reports

The Source, Byline and Object Name fields are used in the standard reports. Hence, logging of these fields is enabled by default. While it is technically possible to disable logging of these fields, we strongly advise against it since doing so will render the standard reports useless.

Note: Built-in support for external tracking tools has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. These tools include Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and PIWIK.

To consistently track user navigation on the site and get insights on navigation patterns etc, we recommend configuring FotoWeb to allow Google Analytics tracking. Learn more about that in the topic on FotoWeb and Google Analytics.