This week starts the annual fashion week in Paris where fashion designers, brands or "houses" display their latest collections in runway fashion shows to buyers and the media. These events influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons.
This week is the Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2020 kicks off, where photographers will capture the best of the show and the most stylish looks seen on the streets between shows.
I'm still spending myself some good time working my friends photographers to help them in their image workflow and one of the most business requirement service beyond the selection and retouching is to share easily all the collections after years in a "DAM" system.
Most of them have big archives with To of pictures of their last 30 years. It is is a real problem for them to secure this content. They have to figure out with a couple of hard drives with a mix of WeTransfert, Drive or Dropbox things. In the mean time in about 20 years the business has really changed and when in 2000 you can get 3000 $ and more for the picture of the cover of Paris Match this is not any more the case today. Photographers are struguling just to update their cameras so they cannot invest into a professional DAM system to archive, organise and retrieve their photos.
Serge Arnal a well know fashion, corporate sand presse photographer with 30 years of experience told me "...today our work has completely changed, it is becoming very difficult to make a living from it, and we must change our approach to the profession by adapting to the needs of brands. Our tools have changed, and we have to play between our old DSLR and the mobile and be able to share photos in one click..."
In this article I want to highlight solutions for all photographer within the bests ROI :
Image Workflow :
Before sharing anything it is important for all photographers to organise their assets with Metadata. The best way is to use IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) that can be embedded inside the files so when you will store and archive your assets you will also save the metadata. You have a couple of software for this task :
- Adobe Bridge
- Adobe Lightroom
- Adobe Photoshop
- Capture One
But my twi favorites are Photo Mechanic and Fotostation to speed up your PHOTOGRAPHY WORKFLOW.
The minute you put down the camera, your post-processing workflow begins. Quickly ingest photos from your memory cards and pick your winners without having to wait. Use tools originally created for photographers under the world’s most extreme deadlines to add information such as captions, keywords, and copyright to your images as fast as possible.
Photo Mechanic 6 enhance with new features and here a nice video to discover the software :
Fotostation is a leader to manage your image workflow and the one I'm using everyday of my DAM Manager life since 2000...During the fashion show with my friends we have to organize and index thousands of assets in hours and Fotostation is performing super well.
In this video you will have a good overview of the capabilities of FOTOSTATION
DAM for PHOTOGRAPHERS
1- SYNOLOGY & DS PHOTO
At that stage you need t share your content, a lot of them are still using WeTransfert, Drive or DropBox and the experience is improving after years with dedicated mobile application, easy to use and low cost... but very limited for metadata support.
One of the best solution is provided by Synology to brand and broadcast your photography business :
- The Perfect Storage for Content Creators. Synology NAS simplifies the way you manage your digital content with centralized photo storage and on-the-go file access and sharing.
- The system is powered by Photo Station which is built for professional photographers to manage photo storage, share and access portfolios on the go, collect client feedback.
- DS photo save your mobile photos to Photo Station through manual upload or automatic backup, and stream them to smart TVs and other devices for expanded viewing.
- From local drives to your Synology NAS, your photos will be organized in the same structure, and into smart albums with custom criteria.
- Embrace Popular Metadata Standards XMP, Exif, and IPTC — are supported to make it easy viewing, editing, and searching photo tags.
- Easy management, smart albums. Group photos and videos into topical albums by custom criteria and selected tags.
- Build a personal gallery to showcase your photography online.
- Show photos through native apps for Android TV and Apple TV, and stream them to Chromecast and DLNA devices for display.
- Easily view photos or videos stored on Synology NAS with your smartphone or tablet. Enable instant upload to automatically save photos from mobile devices to your Synology NAS.
This hardware and software solution is to be honest the perfect deal to organize all your digital assets. As for example I use the DS18+ 24 To for only 1000 euros !! And thanks to a fiber internet connexion I can get access to all my digital library in seconds. I have more than 2 millions of assets full indexed available at my fingers. So for any photographers with To of pictures this is the best solution, no photographer can afford 10 To and more in the cloud...
Synology with DS Photo can really be considered as a DAM solution.
2- Adobe Lightroom
If you want to manage a DAM solution full in the cloud you can consider using Lightroom CC able to organize and manage your assets from your Desktop, Mobile and the web. Nether the less you have to pay a minimum of 70 $ per month with only 1 To.
Head over to lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe ID. All the photos you’ve added to synced collections through your Lightroom Classic catalog are here, as well as any you’ve imported directly into Lightroom CC (iOS/Android/Win/Mac) or even Lightroom Web, are visible on the All Photos screen. You can access this from any web browser, so file this away as a handy tip for creating/managing albums (collections) anywhere you have Internet.
3- FOTOWARE
As we saw Fotostation from Fotoware is one of the top leader in photo editing and the vendor is proving also one of the best DAM full featured and directly connected to Fotostation Pro. For any photographers they can get access to a FotoWeb DAM solution between 175$ et 600$ per month.
You can check all the pricing options here.
4- PHRASEANET
To end up my selection I will present you Phraseanet my DAM since the last 25 years for 2 reasons :
- Driven by Metadata and expertise in photography
- Read and Write live IPTC
- Taxonomies, Facets
- Easy Admin
- KPI
- OPEN SOURCE !!!
Alchemy is the only market player in France to have chosen Open Source for its solution, Phraseanet. Alchemy is a team of 5 developers and a network of partners who contribute to the enhancement of the software. With 2 major releases a year, the software is constantly evolving. Phraseanet sources are available to all from the download page. You may download it and use it for free.
Today, there have been more than 30 000 downloads and several tens of millions of multimedia files managed by Phraseanet servers on the 5 continents.
Alchemy implements Phraseanet on AWS platforms (Private or Public Cloud). Their SAAS offers are built on high availability infrastructures and have no limitation on the number of files. Alchemy ensures the application outsourcing, our technological partners offer the hardware outsourcing.
Phraseanet is a complete answer to the needs of photographers but also organizations, associations, companies, administrations, who need to manage efficiently, publish, share and enhance their digital content.
Phraseanet 4.0 gets often brand new addons. Interconnection is made very easily with the applications of your own information system. Plugins for Microsoft Office, Magento, WordPress, Webgalleries, Drupal, Adobe CC InDesign & Photoshop, are already available.
And now a Live image workflow and DAM DEMO for Photographers :
As a conclusion you can manage all your image workflow even with a small budget. Let's contact us if you need any help to advise you, make a discovery of your library, working your standard and custom metadata, vocabulary, to share easily your content in all the communication channels.
Frédéric SANUY
