Do you have an archiving system
Please take a moment and take the poll above, then check back in a day or so and see what others also checked. I predict that if everyone I know took this toll that more than half of all the companies would have no archiving searchable database for their photography.
Are you adding value to the company?
Take a moment and see if you can put your hands on the last couple of projects that you used photography. Where did you look?
Did you look in your top drawer of your desk? Did you go to someone and they pulled the Disc of images from their desk?
Maybe your office is really organized and they were in a project folder in the filing cabinet.
Historical Photos
Does your company have a place that all the historical photos of the company reside? Do you have copies of the ground breaking for the first building? Do you have the ribbon cutting photos from the grand opening? Do you have photos of the CEO and the board?
Back in the early 1980s Georgia Institute of Technology was planning their centennial celebration. They wanted to do a coffee table book of all that had happened since 1885.
So they started digging for images. They were going everywhere and finding very little. They didn't have a central location for their images. This sound familiar?
It was this process that led them to create a department that had photography. Up until then, most all the photos were from the students and an occasional freelancer hired by the school.
When I started with them some 10 years later, I was assigned the task to create a searchable computer database. We used the Cumulus software and shared the images on our internal network.
IT Department Lost it all: TWICE!!
After about 5 years of scanning slides and negatives we had a disaster. The IT department was in charge of the server and backing it up. They backed it up on a tape system. Well that system was corrupted and we lost 5 years of work.
You see we had the original file and a backup. You need three to be safe and they only had two.
We hired a new person that all they did for one year was to rescan and help us rebuild the database.
Five years after that disaster the same thing happened again. My trust of IT departments was at an all time low.
Cost of online storage
All electronics have a life expectancy and do not last forever. Today you can buy an external hard with 1TB of storage for around $100. Using the formula that you need a minimum of 3 different places for a digital file to reside for it to be safe would mean you need to spend about $300 for three 1 TB hard drives.
You can spend for just the storage alone from about $9 per month or $108 a year. They do the backups for you. So, for the price of a hard drive you can store all you need online for the same price as just 1 hard drive.
Click on this link [photo] and get $15 discount. I also get a small fee back to help support this blog.
Sharing on-line
The best solution today is to have not just your images stored on-line, but searchable on-line. I would highly recommend PhotoShelter for most companies and individuals. There are different levels of service. You can signup for an individual or corporate account. The advantages of the corporate account is having many photographers, editors and more working all at the same time on the system. This is important on the back end where the posting the images to the system and organizing them takes place.
On the front end to those searching there is little difference between the two. You can give access to search your images based on three basic approaches.
First, you may choose that anyone can see your photos or just you.
Second, you can make it viewable by those with passwords or
third they can see them by logging in with an email and a password just for that email.
Now there are many variables of those basic three concepts of access to the photos.
Search is King
The best part of having an online presence is the ability of people to search your images. Of course the key is you must put text with each photo. We do this through metadata. This is text that is buried in the image in code. Using software like Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Lightroom, PhotoMechanic and other photo editing software you can embed photos with caption, keywords, photographers name, company name and more.
Most likely today you are working with images that were shot on a digital camera which also puts searchable information on every image in the metadata as well. They put things like date, time, f/stop, shutter-speed and things like even GPS into the metadata.
PhotoShelter makes this simple to search giving you some fields to help narrow down the search like keywords, city it was shot in and is it model released or not.
When you find an image
What can you do once you find an image--that depends on how you set it up. You can make it that they can only see the image, can download a low res or high resolution images, or they can order things like prints or items like a coffee mug with the photo on it.
Reuse
The key to all this online storage is that now your images that you had paid to have created are not just accessible by you, but you can easily share them with the rest of your company or even the world.
Every company and organization that I have worked with almost always says this is one of the hallmark services they now offer their organizations. Having all the images online helps them with using the material over and over.
They can now use the images: on their website more often, their social media, send access to the media to download images, to their employees to use in their presentations, and more places.
While the initial cost of hiring a photographer to shoot for your organization may seem costly, having this material used in more places to help promote your company makes the images worth a lot more to the brand.
One Use or Less
Are you using the photos one time that you hired a photographer to produce? What about all the similar shots that were not used. Do they go to waste or does your company use them in other places?
Two things will happen if you choose to use an online system that is accessible to your people no matter where they are in the world as long as they have access to the web. First of all you will start to get phone calls and emails from more and more people asking for access to your database of photos. Second, you will get emails saying people are not finding photos.
I can't find something
People will start to think that their are photographers shooting all the time for this database and surely there is a photo of something they need. You will soon be saying, no we don't have that image in the database, no one has shot that. Would you like to pay to have that done? Maybe you have the budget and say we can get a photographer to shoot that for you.
The demand will go up and your value to the company will rise as well. Make your companies brand stronger by making images available.
