Searching SharePoint Document and Image Libraries

Question

We recently migrated to office 365 and are now trying to take advantage of SharePoint but are really pretty new to the whole thing. We want to have one place to search for all customer related documents and photos.

We initially thought we would create a document library and dump everything into it, this way we would just have one simple place to look but didn't like the way we couldn't see the thumbnail view of photos so now we are thinking we could a document library and an image or asset library but now our users would have to look into both places. This seems like a pretty basic request and I'm sure has been done countless times.

The process we are thinking about is :

1. User submits a Job Setup form 
2. It triggers a workflow that creates the Docset
3. The users works out of the docset until the job is complete (possibly another workflow to email link to the docset) 

I think this would work for just working out of because most of our users who would want to see the images are going to be using search or filtering. Are there anyways to have the search results have thumbnails for photos? E.g.; User searches for Job# 221 it would show all docs and images for that? And the same would happen if they searched by customer? I was playing around with something similar to this with a text filter but whatever library I attached to it just showed empty.

What are our options?

Answer 1

MSDN documentation: Plan document management in SharePoint 2013

Especially look into the possibilities of SharePoint DocumentSets

http://en.share-gate.com/blog/document-sets-making-your-metadata-shine

You create one DocumentSet per customer with a custom Metadata field CustomerName

Every document/picture you then put into that DocumentSet can then (automagically) be stamped with that CustomerName.

You now have the metadata (on every document or picture) you can use in Search or Content Query webparts or Views or Filtered Webparts..

One step further is the SharePoint Content Organizer where you can pre-process/approve documents in one central Library and based on metadata can be (automagically) transferred to the correct Libraries/DocumentSets

All takes some playing time to master the concept, but is the true power of SharePoint

Answer 2

The most simple thing to do would be to create a page and place a list view web part for your document library and another one for your image/asset library.

You can set default views specifically for this page as well as place them in whatever page layout you prefer.

Answer 3

It is much better to place related information into separate libraries, as this makes document management easier. To show all the assets in one location, use the Content Search Web Part on a newly created page, and begin modifying the properties via the query builder to show the content that is relevant.

Here is a quick guide to get you started:

https://support.office.com/en-in/article/Configure-a-Content-Search-Web-Part-in-SharePoint-0dc16de1-dbe4-462b-babb-bf8338c36c9a