At Tourism Media, we manage hundreds and sometimes thousands of images a day. Our team of professional photographers are constantly sending us photos from all over the world and we have fine tuned a content management system that allows us to seamlessly handle all that information, while making sure we are using the very best shots for our clients.
We thought we’d take a look at the systems our departments have in place to ensure it all works.
(Bear in mind that after a recent 2 1/2 week shoot, in New Zealand, one of our photographers returned home with 10,000 shots – not including video)
The process starts with our Head of Image Management, Matt Officen (known in the office as MO) who is the first one in the office to handle the images.
(Being the technical genius that he is, MO took a time lapse of just 15 minutes of his day which helps explain how the system works.)
You can see it below.
The photos usually arrive on a drive and MO makes a first pass through them, highlighting which ones to keep and which aren’t up to scratch.
The next step is to ensure the photos look their best with some cropping, editing and colour correction.
Once that is all finished, MO hands the job over to Sawyer, TM’s Digital Expert who loads all the images into our proprietary Image Management System (IMS).
This system allows us to take photo data en masse and transform it using a system of funnelling and filtering into aneat, managed database.
In particular, the IMS looks for any errors e.g. incorrect names, aspect ratios, colour profiles or credit information.
Once everything is perfect, all the photos that have made it through are loaded into our content management system known as gearbox.
Once everything has been correctly approved by all parties, the images go live on our clients websites.
