You can copy items among Projects and Reviews without increasing your storage usage and upload counts. Here's what you need to know.
You can copy more than one item at a time. You can even copy one or more items from multiple Reviews. Not only that, you can copy them to multiple Reviews, even in multiple Projects, in one step.
Sketches and comments from the original will not appear in the copy. If you need the item with its comments in another Review, use the Move To… function instead. (If the comments and sketches from the original do appear in the new copy, it is because you are viewing comments in All Notes mode. See FAQ below for details.)
You cannot duplicate an item into a Review where that item already exists.
You cannot duplicate an item into a different Workspace.
Adding an item to other Reviews
Copying is done from the Project Overview, not the Review Player. You can access the controls for this the same way you do for moving items, in the media drawer that can be revealed beneath each Review.
The method depends on whether you are viewing media in Grid View or Table View.
When you select one or more items in the media drawer, a floating toolbar appears.
Use "Add to…" to add the selection to other review(s).
At the top of the dialog that appears will be icons representing the selected Item(s). Use the rest of the dialog to choose a Review to copy the Items to. You can also create a new Review to copy Items into by clicking create new.
Above the Review list is a search bar that filters the list of available Reviews as you type.
The list below that is scrollable, with the most recently active reviews collected in a section at the top for your convenience. Below that is a list of reviews organized by the projects that you have access to.
Click each Review you want to copy the item to and click the Add Items button.
Viewing selection details
If you'd like to omit selected clips from the operation or you would like to see the full filenames of the selected items, you can do so without leaving the dialog.
Click on the expansion icon (⌄)in the upper right corner. This will allow you to see the item names or drop individual items from the selection. (It will not remove the clip from any reviews or from your workspace.)
Removing and Deleting Items
Removing items from a Review does not mark the clip for deletion and will not free up storage usage unless you remove the Item from every Review that has a copy. Once an item is no longer in any Review it is marked for deletion, and will be deleted after a few days, recovering storage space.
If you accidentally remove it from all Reviews and would like to recover it before it is permanently deleted, contact us at support@syncsketch.com with:
- The email address of your SyncSketch account
- The file name you wish to recover (you can find it in your Project's Activity tab)
- The review name you wish to recover it into.
Tip: Copying an Item into a "backup" Review, even in a different Project, will prevent the Item from being fully deleted. Keeping a copy in a different Review is a way to ensure that an Item can never be permanently deleted (and thus can always be restored), even if an erroneous deletion is discovered weeks or months after the fact.
Monitoring Activity
You can monitor who has copied what items to where using the Project's Activity tab.
Roles and Permissions
Anyone with the ability to move an item also has the permissions to copy it. This includes Project members with roles higher than "Viewer" and "Reviewer".
You must be an invited member of a project to access the Copy function; External Collaborators and Guests for public Projects will not be able to copy files.
Known quirks and limitations
The initial release of this feature has some design limitations in order to make it available sooner. There can always be improvements made to any feature and this is no exception. If addressing any of these is important to you, please create or upvote a feature request in our feedback system to help us prioritize our development efforts.
- Currently, the name, approval status and thumbnail of an item are common to all Reviews. Changes made to these will be reflected in the Item in every Review where it appears. We understand that this is not always desirable and hope to address it in a future release. (Upvote this feature request)
- Currently, there is no way to duplicate items and preserve their annotations(Comments and Sketches) in the duplicate. Moving an item will preserve them in the destination Review but Add to will not.
- The floating toolbar for copying items is not usable on mobile devices like iPads.
- Renaming a clip in one Review will rename it in all of them.
- Currently there is no way to determine a complete list of reviews that an item is in.
- There's no way to delete an item from all reviews at once.
- You cannot move or copy an item from within the Review Player. (upvote)
Advanced concepts
Sometimes a little explanation about what is happening "under the hood" can go a long way toward explaining unexpected behaviors. This is not information most users need to know, but some users will want to.
Most properties are dependent on the Review
In the SyncSketch catalog, items exist in a table as items, but in Reviews (where you can access them), they are tracked in the context of the Review. Therefore most properties of an item in its review are independent of those properties of the same item in another Review. There are a few exceptions; the important ones are noted above.
FAQ
If copying an item does not copy the comments and sketches, why am I seeing comments and sketches from the original in the new copy?
This is because your Review is set in All Notes mode, which aggregates comments and sketches from all copies in the Project. At the top of the Comments pane you can switch this to Current Review Only mode, which will hide the other notes.
