A showcase is a public gallery of assets published from your library, with its own web address, its own layout and its own branding. What makes it different from a folder of files posted somewhere is how the contents are chosen: a showcase does not hold a list of assets, it holds a saved filter. Anything in the library matching that filter appears in the gallery, which means the gallery keeps itself up to date.
Most published galleries go stale the day after they are built. Someone assembles a set of images, publishes them, and from that point the page and the library drift apart. New photography does not appear. Withdrawn material stays up. Six months later nobody is confident the public page reflects anything current.
Because a showcase is defined by a filter rather than a list, that drift does not happen. A gallery built on "product photography, approved for external use" contains exactly the assets meeting that description at the moment someone loads the page. Approve a new set and it appears. Change an asset so it no longer matches and it drops out. The gallery is a view of the library, not a copy of part of it.
The practical consequence is that publishing stops being a task. The work moves to keeping metadata accurate, which is work you want done anyway.
A showcase is defined by a small set of fields:
The metadata profile is worth dwelling on, because it is what separates a gallery from a dump of images. A visitor looking at a press photo usually needs to know who took it and what they may do with it, and both of those already exist as metadata on the asset. Choosing the right profile publishes them without exposing the fields you use for internal workflow.
A gallery of forty images is fine as a single grid. A gallery of four hundred is not. Setting the categorization type to a metafield groups the gallery by that field's values, up to two levels deep, giving visitors navigation rather than an endless scroll.
The natural choices are the fields people already think in: product line, campaign, year, location, asset type. Because the grouping is driven by metadata rather than configured by hand, it also stays correct as the gallery's contents change.
Showcases have two controls. The public toggle determines whether the gallery is reachable externally at all, and leaving it off keeps the showcase private while you build it. A password can be set to require visitors to authenticate before any content is shown.
The more important point is that the filter is itself an access decision. A showcase publishes whatever matches, so a filter scoped too broadly will publish assets nobody intended to release, and it will do so quietly. Build the filter on metadata that expresses approval or intended audience, not just on subject matter, and check what it returns in the library before setting the showcase public.
Both share assets outside the organisation, and they are built for opposite situations:
Put simply: a portal is something you send to someone, a showcase is somewhere you point people. If you find yourself rebuilding the same portal for each new recipient with the same content, that is a showcase. If you are tailoring what each audience sees, that is a portal.
Showcases fit content that is published rather than delivered:
Because the filter is effectively the whole feature, it repays a little thought. Keep it simple: showcases work with straightforward filter conditions, not deeply nested logic. Base it on metadata you deliberately maintain, such as an approval or usage field, rather than on where an asset happens to be filed, since folder structures get reorganised and filters built on them quietly break.
Save the filter first and confirm in the library that it returns what you expect. The gallery will faithfully publish whatever the filter finds, which is its strength and the reason to check.
Showcases are enabled per workspace. If the Showcases section does not appear under Share, contact your administrator or Data Dwell support.