Library

What Warden takes, and what it never takes

What is on record for an asset is its slug, its title, its short name, its kind, its file names, and its pictures. A picture is either an address where it already lives, or one you uploaded. Of a picture you uploaded, Warden keeps a watermarked preview for you to look at and what it needs to compare against it, and deletes the original once both are stored.

Warden also records file names, and only file names. A name that looks like a path off somebody's machine is refused, because a path is personal information about the person whose machine it is. Where a folder is read, the reading happens on your machine and only the names are sent. The files never leave it.

That boundary is deliberately narrow. Warden needs names for this work and does not need contents. If some later feature ever needs contents, that is that feature's case to argue, and it does not get to ride in on this one.

Names that arrived from somewhere public are filtered before they are stored, because a file name somebody else uploaded can carry a stranger's display name in it.

Reading the library

The library opens on boards: All assets, each of your collections, whatever you have not filed, and, once you have retired a design, the Retired board. Somebody with hundreds of designs thinks in themes rather than in one flat list. Inside a board the assets are a grid of tiles or a list, a filter shows one kind at a time where your library holds more than one, and search says how many of how many matched.

A collection is your own arrangement. An asset can sit in several, and being in one never proves anything about ownership. An open collection has a strip across the top that is also where you drop assets to file them, one at a time or a whole selection.

One asset

Opening a tile opens the asset in a drawer, in this order:

• Its render, its title, and how many listings Warden has found of it.

• What it is: a model, an artwork, a brand, or other.

• Its pictures, each with what it is for, and a place to add another.

• Whether it is searched first, and why.

• The collections it is in.

• The file names Warden knows it by.

• At the foot, Retire this design. A retired design leaves the library and Swarm stops searching for it, and the findings that name it stay. It opens from the Retired board, says when it left, and can be put back in the library.

Adding assets

Add assets offers two ways in, and neither stores anything until you have read what it would keep. Paste a list of names, or choose a folder on your machine, where only the file names are read and the files never leave it.

Adding a picture

An uploaded picture is a WebP, PNG or JPEG of up to 10 MB, dropped on the drawer or chosen with Browse. Unless the asset is an artwork, Warden asks what the picture is before it is kept, and it never guesses:

An artwork is not asked. Its file is the work itself, so it is always what sellers' photographs are compared against. A picture given as an address instead is shown in the library and compared against nothing.

Searched first

An asset can be marked searched first. Two things put it there, and the library tells you which:

It is worth knowing exactly what the mark does. Every place gives a scan a fixed budget, so a large library is covered over several scans, and Swarm spends each budget on the designs that have waited longest since their last search. Among designs that have waited equally long, the ones marked searched first go first.

What Warden learns from it

Your library compiles into a profile: what Warden recognizes as yours. You do not write it and you cannot edit it as a list of rules. Warden derives it from your own catalog, and where it is not confident it asks you a question instead of guessing.

flowchart TD
  L(["Your library"]) --> C["Warden compiles a profile version"]
  C --> Q("Confident about what changed?")
  Q -- "Yes" --> V(["A new version, and nothing asked of you"])
  Q -- "No" --> A["The confident part is stored, and you get one question"]
  A --> V
  V --> S["Scans plan from that version, and record which one"]
  class L,V warden
  class Q ask

A question is always about ambiguity and nothing else. Warden asks it in your words, shows the examples from your own library that prompted it, and says what changes either way.

A profile version is never edited. When your library changes, Warden compiles a new one. Where something you already confirmed is contradicted by your own catalog later, your confirmation is not overwritten: it is raised for you to look at.

A scan records the profile version it planned from, so a finding keeps reading the way it did on the day it was made, whatever the profile says later.

What a profile contains, and how Warden weighs one part of it against another, is not published. That is the part of the product a seller would write listings around.