Administrator's Quick Start Part 3

Once you have setup some users, and how your metadata will be displayed you might want to setup your own cloud storage bucket for storing content. iconik comes with the ability to use our secure cloud storage, but you might prefer to have all your files on your own cloud storage bucket directly with the provider of your choice. We support a variety of vendors, Amazon S3, anything that implements the S3 storage protocol properly, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure for example.

When you have setup your storage bucket we can read and write files too and from it, and you can perform management of your files from the iconik web interface.

In the video Mike shows how to setup a Backblaze B2 bucket, but the setup is similar for other vendors.

1. Set up your cloud bucket

  1. Make sure that you have the credentials to hand for your storage provider. This might involve setting up keys or a particular user for iconik to use when accessing. You might also want to know the region and the path
  2. Login to iconik
  3. Click on ADMIN in the top navigation.
  4. Choose Storages from the left navigation bar.
  5. Click on + NEW STORAGE to open the form to create a storage.
  6. Choose a name, storage purpose, and storage type. As you setting up a cloud bucket to store your files we would suggest:
    • Name: Where it's located and/or the purpose you are going to use it for.
    • Purpose: Files
    • Type: Match to the storage vendor. If it's an S3 compatible storage then select S3.
  7. There will be several other parameters available to you. These are covered in our help article Creating a storage under the section "Choosing parameters for storage type". But if you want to Read, Write and Delete files you should pick those at least.
  8. You can also define who can see and use files from this storage - and this can use the User Groups we setup previously. For instance you can setup multiple storage buckets - one for each department if you like.
  9. You can also tag files that come from this storage bucket, and this can use a metadata field that was also setup previously. This might help you find files later.
  10. Click to continue with the creation.
  11. Fill in the form.
  12. Click to create the storage.
  13. This will then check if we have access to the storage and can do the operations that we need to do.
  14. If storage did not succeed it may still create a storage where it is possible to change settings to make it work, for example - making sure the credentials that you put in are correct, or that the storage bucket is setup properly on the vendor's side.

2. Scanning storage

If the storage bucket that you configured iconik to use already had files in it, it's possible to start a scan operation that will pull those files into iconik. We will even create previews for supported filetypes.

  1. Click on ADMIN in the top navigation.
  2. Choose Storages from the left navigation bar.
  3. Click Scan icon next to the storage that you just added to iconik

This operation can take some time depending on how many files you have in your bucket. If it's just 10s of small image files you might to start seeing content appear in the next few minutes. If it's thousands of long videos it can take several hours for it to complete, but as files are processed they will start to show up in the iconik web interface.

Next Steps

You might also want to view our storage tutorials for a more in-depth overview of setting up different storage configurations

Learn more