Display Defaults

Every person browsing the gallery can tailor what it shows them: which fields appear under a card preview, which columns the list view carries, how results are sorted, how many assets fit on a page. Most never open that dialog, so what they see is whatever the workspace hands them.

Display Defaults is where you decide what that is. Configure the gallery once, for everybody, and the people who never touch their own preferences get a library that already shows the fields your organisation cares about.

Page Overview

• Purpose: To set the gallery display settings everybody starts with.
• When to use it: When you roll the DAM out to a new team, when you add a metadata field people should see at a glance, or when you notice nobody has switched card metadata on for themselves.
• What you can do here:
  • Choose the default view, sort order and page size.
  • Turn the hover preview and the card metadata block on by default.
  • Collapse files stored several times into one gallery card by default.
  • Pick which fields show under a card preview and which become list columns, and order them.
  • Clear everyone's personal preferences so the whole workspace follows these defaults.
  • Restore the values Freedam ships with.

Who can use it

Display Defaults is available to administrators with the System settings permission. Everyone else configures only their own gallery, from the display preferences panel in the gallery header.

What it does

Each setting on this page has two layers. The tenant layer is what you set here. The personal layer is what somebody sets for themselves from the gallery. The personal layer wins whenever it exists, and it only exists once that person has actually changed something.

That has two consequences worth knowing:

• Saving here reaches every account that has never customised its gallery, including accounts created later. Nobody has to do anything; the change is there on their next page load.
• It does not reach somebody who has already set their own preferences. Their choice is deliberate, so it stands until you clear it.

Anonymous visitors on a public share link also see these defaults, since they have no preferences of their own.

Page Layout

• Top bar: The page title and the Save changes button.
• Default display options: View, sort field, sort direction, assets per page, and the hover preview, card metadata and collapse identical files switches.
• Card metadata and list columns: The full field catalogue, each row with a card switch, a list switch and a drag handle.
• Apply to everyone: How many people currently have their own preferences, plus the two rollout actions.

Default display options

These are the gallery's opening state before anyone adjusts it.

• View — Grid or List.
• Sort by — Date created, Date updated, Name, File size, or any metadata field you promoted as sortable in Search Configuration.
• Sort direction — Newest first or oldest first.
• Assets per page — 12, 24, 48 or 96.
• Hover preview — Whether pointing at an asset opens the preview popover.
• Card metadata — Whether the metadata block appears under each card preview. This switch is the gate: the fields you pick below only show in grid view while it is on.
• Collapse identical files: whether a file stored several times, byte for byte the same, shows as one gallery card with the number of copies the search matched. Turn it on when your team uploads the same datasheet or video once per product, so a search does not list every copy. It is off in the built-in defaults. See Identical files for how the Gallery picks the copy it shows.

Card metadata and list columns

The lower card lists every field the gallery can display, grouped by where it comes from: asset properties, custom metadata, people, colours, AI analysis, rights, collections, and the computed display fields the list view uses.

Each row carries two switches:

• Card metadata — the field appears under the preview image on a card, in grid view.
• List column — the field becomes a column in list view.

Drag a row by its handle to change the order; fields appear in the order shown here, top to bottom, in both places. Keep the card list short — three or four fields under a preview read well, a dozen turn the grid into a wall of text.

A field disappears from this list if its metadata definition is deleted or renamed. Nothing is lost: it stays in the stored configuration and comes back as soon as the definition does.

Apply to everyone

The rollout card tells you how many people have their own display preferences and therefore ignore what you set above.

Apply to everyone clears those personal preferences so the whole workspace falls back to the defaults on this page. It is a deliberate reset: the preferences people set for themselves are deleted and cannot be recovered, so the button asks for confirmation first. Use it when you have just configured a default that everybody should see, not as routine maintenance.

Restore built-in defaults puts this page back to the values Freedam ships with. It changes the tenant layer only; personal preferences are untouched.

Good to know

• People can always undo a default for themselves from the gallery's display preferences panel, and the Reset to defaults button there returns them to this page's configuration rather than to Freedam's built-in one.
• Sort, view and page size are still per-request: a link carrying ?sort_by= or ?view= wins over both layers for that page load. These settings decide what happens when nothing is in the URL.
• Promoting a metadata field as sortable happens in Search Configuration, not here; once promoted, it appears in this page's sort list.