Samfoto Case Study

Color Factory is highly underrated

- It’s my impression that many who want to build an image archive for the web start at the wrong end! They’re focused on the presentation on screen, while taking image quality, captioning and searchability much too lightly, says Mr. Arild Hansen at the Norwegian image agency Samfoto.

In the past five to six years this agency has built up a web archive of more that 180 000 pictures. Different FotoWare products have been put to use both in the construction of the archive and the handling of purchases the web.

Make shit shine?
- It’s easy to find software that makes it possible to browse your pictures, and that will present them more or less elegantly. Dozens of image collections are available on the net that may look nice at first glance. One might actually suspect the prevalence of the old advertising slogan make shit shine! Often, a system’s weaknesses are exposed quite quickly - alternating standards, poor file quality or inadequate metadata for retrieval.

- At Samfoto we have assisted both small businesses and large organizations looking for a way to get their image collections sorted. Most need advice on finding images in their collections and presenting them on the net. Only a few have given any though to the actual image flow in the organization, from photographer to the final presentation, says Hansen. – Unless they can ensure good pictures and a minimum quality on the text information that goes with them, even the best search and retrieval system or visual presentation won’t get the job done.

Modest co-worker
- As far as our own archive at Samfoto goes, we have taken care to build it on a solid foundation right from the start. When we started building our digital image archive at the turn of the millennium, we cooperated closely with the contributing photographers. Not only did we require quality pictures, we also required that pictures be delivered according to certain norms, using reliable file standards and relevant captions. Because, in the end, building an image archive means work! Lots of routine operations, picture by picture!

Luckily, some operations can be automated, which is where Color Factory has been of vital importance. Today, all the pictures in the archive are run through Color Factory, and the program performs a number of important functions:

1. Image files from photographers are quality tested, and corrupted files are filtered out.
2. Color Factory ensures uniformity of standards in dpi, colors etc.
3. If the file info fields in the received pictures contain unwanted text, this text is removed.
4. In our archive, Color Factory ensures uniformity of captions, archive categories, copyright information etc. This text is automatically applied to the correct text fields in the image files.
5. Our archive system contains files with both Norwegian and English text. With Color Factory, we can be assured that the Norwegian archive gets Norwegian text and the English gets English text. For example, a user searching for “spring” in the Norwegian archive will find pictures of water taps, not spring flowers as in the English archive.

What’s more, Color Factory works 24 hours a day, without pay or lunch breaks…in that respect it’s a modest co-worker, and certainly easier to be around than the rest of us!

My impression is that Color Factory is underrated, and that it’s somewhat left in the shadows compared with your other products. Besides, FotoWare has given it a slightly misleading name – Color Factory does so much more than color processing.

Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen’s pictures run through Color Factory
- We have been using the program for several years now, and we are still finding new ways to use it. A recent cooperative undertaking of Samfoto’s and Dagsavisen’s, where pictures from Dagsavisen’s photographers were merged with the Samfoto archive, while at the same time preserving Samfoto’s archiving standards, could not have been undertaken without Color Factory.

- But you are also running other FotoWare software?

- We are using FotoStation in-house. And we publish pictures on the web using FotoWeb. In both places, Index Manager indexes the image collections. And these programs are of course doing the job the way they should. If they hadn’t, Samfoto would have stopped completely!