Image management solution saves time and cost at eStyle
When San Francisco-based maternity and baby gear e-retailer eStyle’s product images grew into the hundreds, individual images became harder to find on the server where they were stored – some of them disappeared from the radar screen altogether. The company’s move beyond the web into other channels, including catalogs and the print ad campaign it produced in-house, demanded a better solution. “With an outside photographer’s cost, a model’s cost, and the cost of getting the products in, those images were worth a lot of money. With a negative cost of several hundred dollars per image, you don’t want to lose that image,” says Roy Leamon, graphics project manager who worked with eStyle.
EStyle turned to MediaBin, providers of software that manages image content for web sites. The Atlanta-based technology developer’s image management software saved eStyle the cost of hiring additional full-time staff to manage its rapidly expanding digital photo files and saved time and money when eStyle began to repurpose photos for other uses and formats, says Leamon, who oversaw MediaBin’s implementation at eStyle.
Leamon, who initially shot all of eStyle’s product images for the web site himself, says that being able to find the images on the server and quickly identify their properties became critical after eStyle began using outside photographers and shooting outside the studio. If misplaced, many of the photos weren’t easy to replicate, as products temporarily in for the shoot were returned to the manufacturer after a few days.
Determining whether the stored images on the server were digital camera photos or scanned-in film transparencies was also a big issue, as digital camera photos aren’t of a sufficiently high resolution for use in print formats. But it does work the other way: MediaBin’s software and automated program can identify high resolution film images, scan them into a digital file and extract them in any format needed. “If I want to repurpose a whole folder full of high resolution images for the web, I can run the MediaBin task, go have lunch and it’s done when I get back,” Leamon says.
The $20,000 -$30,00 cost of the software for use with two processors on one server was justified by the fact that the automated solution saved eStyle the cost of hiring one or more additional staff to manage and repurpsoe the images manually, Leamon says. “Digital assets really are assets,” he says. “Why have a $1,000 image you use once when you could potentially use it in several different places? The more use you can get out of them, the more they pay for themselves.”
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