Do you have an archiving system
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Sharing on-line
The best solution today is to have not just your images stored on-line, but searchable on-line. I would highly recommend PhotoShelter for most companies and individuals. There are different levels of service. You can signup for an individual or corporate account. The advantages of the corporate account is having many photographers, editors and more working all at the same time on the system. This is important on the back end where the posting the images to the system and organizing them takes place.
On the front end to those searching there is little difference between the two. You can give access to search your images based on three basic approaches. First, you may choose that anyone can see your photos or just you. Second, you can make it viewable by those with passwords or third they can see them by logging in with an email and a password just for that email.
Now there are many variables of those basic three concepts of access to the photos.
Search is King
The best part of having an online presence is the ability of people to search your images. Of course the key is you must put text with each photo. We do this through metadata. This is text that is buried in the image in code. Using software like Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Lightroom, PhotoMechanic and other photo editing software you can embed photos with caption, keywords, photographers name, company name and more.
Most likely today you are working with images that were shot on a digital camera which also puts searchable information on every image in the metadata as well. They put things like date, time, f/stop, shutter-speed and things like even GPS into the metadata.
PhotoShelter makes this simple to search giving you some fields to help narrow down the search like keywords, city it was shot in and is it model released or not.
When you find an image
What can you do once you find an image–that depends on how you set it up. You can make it that they can only see the image, can download a low res or high resolution images, or they can order things like prints or items like a coffee mug with the photo on it.
Reuse
The key to all this online storage is that now your images that you had paid to have created are not just accessible by you, but you can easily share them with the rest of your company or even the world.
Every company and organization that I have worked with almost always says this is one of the hallmark services they now offer their organizations. Having all the images online helps them with using the material over and over.
They can now use the images: on their website more often, their social media, send access to the media to download images, to their employees to use in their presentations, and more places.
While the initial cost of hiring a photographer to shoot for your organization may seem costly, having this material used in more places to help promote your company makes the images worth a lot more to the brand.
One Use or Less
Are you using the photos one time that you hired a photographer to produce? What about all the similar shots that were not used. Do they go to waste or does your company use them in other places?
Two things will happen if you choose to use an online system that is accessible to your people no matter where they are in the world as long as they have access to the web. First of all you will start to get phone calls and emails from more and more people asking for access to your database of photos. Second, you will get emails saying people are not finding photos.
I can’t find something
People will start to think that their are photographers shooting all the time for this database and surely there is a photo of something they need. You will soon be saying, no we don’t have that image in the database, no one has shot that. Would you like to pay to have that done? Maybe you have the budget and say we can get a photographer to shoot that for you.
The demand will go up and your value to the company will rise as well. Make your companies brand stronger by making images available.