Managing Documents and Pictures in Keystone

With Keystone, you can manage both documents and pictures relating to your contacts, family partners, and houses.

Here are a few examples of how you might use documents and pictures with Keystone:

• You can't recall what a particular family partner looks like and you want to see their picture before you meet with them.
• You need to review the mortgage documents for a specific homeowner.
• You want to see the plat drawing for one of your houses.
• You'd like to look over previous personal letters sent to an important donor in preparation for your next contact with them.

Important things to note about documents and pictures

• You can store as many documents and pictures as you want for any person or house.
• Your documents and pictures are not stored in your Keystone database, but rather in folders on your computer.
• Documents - whether they are reports, receipts, or anything else generated by Keystone, or documents created in other programs - are not automatically stored in your Keystone document folders. However, you can manually place document files in any person's or property's document folder and access them through Keystone.
• Develop an affiliate policy about what documents you want to store for contacts, family partners, or houses. Examples include: a special certificate awarded to a contact, mortgage and other agreement documents in a family partner's file, or plats for a house.
  
  Consider as part of this policy adding the creation date for the file at the beginning of your document file names in YYMMDD format (such as 090511 for May 11, 2009) as this will allow Keystone to sort your documents by date in document lists. Example: 090511 Mortgage Documents.doc
• You can store any document you want in your documents folders as long as you have the program required to view it on your computer. When you select a document from within Keystone, it will open using the program on your computer set up as the default for that type of file. For example, Keystone will open files ending in .doc in Microsoft Word.
• All pictures must be stored in JPEG (.jpg) format. This is the format most digital cameras use in creating and storing photos. Pictures can be viewed directly within Keystone.
• Backing up your database from within Keystone does not back up your documents and pictures, as those files and folders are stored separately from your database. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you include these documents and pictures folders in your regular computer or server backups.

Because your documents and pictures are not stored in your database, even if you switch to a copy of your database using Database Selection, the documents and pictures you see are still the original files and not copies. Do not do anything related to your documents while using a copy of your database that you wouldn't normally do in your main database.

• Because scanned documents and digital photos potentially can use a significant amount of disk space, you may find that backups of your Keystone files and folders are much larger than you expected after you start using documents and pictures with Keystone. Suggestions on how best to reduce the sizes of these files without compromising their quality are available on the MTD User Forum in the "Keystone" discussion area.

For more information about documents and pictures

To learn more about how these folders are organized and what file formats can be used with Keystone, see the About Document Files and Folders section.

For more information about managing folders, see the Creating and Managing Document Folders section where you can learn more about creating folders in batch, creating a folder for a single person or property, adding files to a folder, and other topics.

To learn more about accessing and viewing documents and pictures, see The Document List Window and Viewing and Managing Pictures sections.