World Photography Day, August 19  JMP, is a day to celebrate the rich history of photography! World Photography Day was first celebrated in 2010 , marking the date the French government purchased the patent for the Daguerreotype process in 1839. However 10 years later the day is much more recognized and is now known as an international day to celebrate the importance of images around the world.
At Activo photography is part of our DNA, reason why we thought it was the perfect time to make a survey of this market and get a deep dive look at the image workflow of photographers and what solutions are available for them to share their content.

Photography is simply painting with light. Talking about photography is above all talking about photographers. These women and men who, in the space of a fraction of a second, are able to capture the lifelong memory of those who discover their photos.

The JMP is also an opportunity for us to present the festival that is close to our hearts: Visa Pour l'Image, created in 1989,  which takes place every the years at the end of August in Perpignan.

This International Photojournalism Festival is a must-attend event for all lovers of photography and journalism: it honors passionate photographers, some of whom risk their lives, to cover world news, often not encouraging through witness photos. who do the whole world.


This year, for its 33rd edition, with the pandemic, the Festival will take place face-to-face, online and for 2 days on October 8 and 9, exhibitions and meetings will also take place in Paris la Villette.

We will come back in a post dedicated to this event.

Summer is also the occasion for music festivals, concerts, fashion and exceptionally this year the Cannes Film Festival. As always during these shows, most of the photographers are racing to jump from one parade or from one photocal to another to capture the best of the atmospheres and collections of the most beautiful brands. Media demands have exploded in recent years along with the needs of e-commerce, newspapers, the web and social networks. At the start of the 2000s, the business for photographers was not yet too bad, but very quickly the atmosphere quickly deteriorated with the challenges of digital.

Our photographer friends Eric Catarina, Serge Arnal, Dominique Charriau are unanimous "... the economic balance is more strained for us, it is becoming difficult for us to change and develop our cameras, we must always produce more with very tight deadlines. short, providing more to earn less ... our means to manage our photo archives are limited ... "

The equipment of a photographer has evolved over the years and beyond the classic Pro DSLR, the mobile is 100% part of the equipment to share and distribute quickly.

In this context we will see in this article what solution exists at the lowest cost for photographers to share their photo archives. Is there a DAM to meet their needs? In our webinar at the beginning of the year we highlighted the challenges of the DAM in 2021 where we listed company solutions but whose cost is at least 30K euros per year and therefore inaccessible for photographers.

Let's start with managing photos, selecting them and indexing them. There is a lot of software on the market for this job:

In this article we 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
• DXO Photolabs
• Fotostation
• Photo Mechanic
• Avalanche

But 2 of our 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

Finally we will add a very last software arrived recently on the market: AVALANCHE with the talented team led by Claudia Zimmer, Matthieu Kopp without forgetting Thomas Ribreau the ex team of Aquafadas.

Capture One:

Capture one is the reference for any pro photographers as soon you want to get no compromise for capture, retouche and deliver best in class images.

Live demo of Capture One 21

DXO Photo labs:

DxO PhotoLab 4 is great contender in editing retouching software for pro photographers. 

Featuring an artificial intelligence technology capable of simultaneously denoising and demosaicing images, a dynamic workspace that can be personalized, batch renaming, a watermarking tool, and more, DxO PhotoLab 4 will transform the way you edit your photographs. Click above for live demo.

AVALANCHE can convert photo catalogs between applications such as Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Skylum Luminar 4, Capture One (*) and Apple Photos (*) commonly used by all 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 solution allows you to enhance your content and distribute your photographic activity with the best return on investment.

This hardware and software solution is the perfect match to organize all your digital assets. On our side we use some DS18 = 24 TB for only 1300 $ !! And thanks to a fiber Internet connection, one can easily access any digital library in seconds. So, for all photographers with TB of photos, this is the best solution, no photographer can afford 10 TB and more in the cloud ...

Synology with DS Photo can really be considered 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 with a small subscription 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.

5- MOMAPIX

Finally, for agencies that bring together a team of photographers, MomaPIX is the right solution for managing large volumes of images with efficient photo management. They are particularly keen to ensure that this photo management revolves around reporting from the organization of photos via a thesaurus, their IPTC indexing and their distribution for sale while automating the application of restrictions and embargoes by country, by sector: essential for photo agencies!

This Italian solution is going international and is starting to have good references in France and elsewhere in Europe.

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.

ACTIVO