The new find-by-ID box makes marketing specific images easier than ever.

Recently, the folks at the Daily Emerald (Univ. of Oregon) asked us about creating an extra search box for their Fotobroker site that would allow customers to plug in any known image ID number, so that the paper could advertise availability of specific images and then give customers the fastest possible way to find them.

We’ve had our quicklinks system running for quite a while now, and it’s been great, but it was pointed out to us that remembering a number is just easier than remembering a web address, even a short quicklink.

Yes, we’ve got themes — and you’ve got options. One is to let your creativity run wild. Maybe you want total control over your site’s look and feel, or you already have some mockups in the works. Great. Our custom install option is for you.

On the other hand, maybe you want to deploy a great-looking new site fast and with minimal hassle. You can save both time and money with our basic install option. Our new Theme Gallery showcases our growing list of standard template options. Browse live demo sites and choose which of our robust, grid-based designs best fits your publication’s needs.

All of our themes include some basic customization at no extra charge, so you don’t have to worry about being locked in to a completely inflexible design.

What better way to ring in the new year than to introduce a brand-new, entirely redesigned Fotobroker administrative user interface? The release will officially hit the figurative streets soon, but for now we would like to invite you to take the new system for a test drive on your Fotobroker site. Give us some feedback, and we’ll use it to make improvements before the final release.

Check out the new Fotobroker Features page to learn more about what the new UI has to offer. If you decide you want to give it a try, contact us and we’ll set you up.

Don’t forget: Today the sun sets on the era of Context Craft — we are now Detroit Softworks, through and through. Please direct your support queries to support [at] detroitsoftworks [dot] com. Read more about the name change in this post. Happy 2010.

We’ve been making a big push during the past couple months to expand the scope of our documentation. Now, the fruits or our efforts are available online in our newly-launched Support Center at detroitsoftworks.com/support. There you’ll find instructive screencast videos, downloadable documents, tutorials, and other useful resources. We will be expanding this new section continuously, so be sure to bookmark the page and visit us often.

A few highlights:

• Brand new Fotobroker Admin Guide PDF
• Gryphon tour screencast series
• Tutorials with illustrative screenshots
• Free DSW digital swag!

If you have suggestions for additional resources you would like made available, drop us a line. We’re always in the market for good ideas.

So… you’re curious about how Gryphon works, but maybe you’re not quite ready to contact us about scheduling a demo. No problem: We’ve put together a four-part series of screencast videos to help introduce you to Gryphon’s administrative backend.

We aren’t calling it a “whirlwind tour” for nothing — there’s much more to Gryphon than we had time to cover here. For more information, you can check out our extended list of Gryphon features, or drop us a line and schedule that hands-on demo after all. We would be more than happy to arrange a guided tour for your staff.

Gryphon walkthrough:
Part one – Articles | Part two – Media | Part three – Blogs | Part four – Galleries

Thanks to the efforts of the good people at ReCaptcha.net, we’re now able to stem the tide of abuse/junk coming in via our Fotobroker request and feedback forms.

To quote from ReCaptcha’s website :
“A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots, “ or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.”

If you’ve got any questions, please let us know. About half of our customers have this in place already on their forms – and we’ll add others as the spammers find them. We were reluctant to make this change – as it’s our contention that anything that comes between our us and our customers (and yours) isn’t good, but the volume of garbage was increasing beyond the level of an irritation, so… Thanks ReCaptcha!

These days, the internet is available on a wide range of mobile devices, and if you’re not presenting your content to the tiny-screen crowd, you risk missing out on a sizable chunk of your potential Web traffic.

Detroit Softworks customers need not fear: With our service, you’ll be well prepared to stride boldly into a brave new world of mobile computing. Our Gryphon CMS offers native support for mobile templates, meaning any content on your news site can easily be served to mobile users, reformatted for optimal viewing on the small screen.

Take a look for yourself — visit demo.detroitsoftworks.com on your iPhone or other mobile device.

If you’re a current Fotobroker customer, you probably noticed some changes to the appearance of your sales and revenue report this month. We’ve just finished updating our report styles to present your sales info in a new layout that’s better organized and easier to read than ever.

But there’s no need to wait for the mail — we’re rolling the upgrade in to all our customer sites as well. Watch the "Reports" area of your Fotobroker administrative interface for access to the sleek new styles.

If you’ve taken a look at the front page of The Daily Tar Heel’s site in the past day or so, you might have noticed something a little different going on.

We’ve just completed work on a few new templates that make this sort of "featured images" functionality easy to set up and manage. Both the large "Photo of the Week" and the gallery of thumbnails below are populated by searching the database of images for a specific piece of metadata info. Any piece, really — keyword, credit line, location, category …

One of the more common usages would be to assign a unique IPTC keyword to images you’d like to appear on the page. Do that right in Photoshop or your favorite piece of image management software (or in Fotobroker’s administration area) and the template is updated automatically as soon as the new images are imported. That means your "featured images" can be rotated out as often as every day.

We’ve been asked several times recently about making links that can find images with captions that contain a specific word (Today’s Word is “Obama” ;)

This functionality is built into Fotobroker – and you can just tack on “&op_caption=contains&caption=obama” to an existing news photo link. If your site has a “Latest Photos” link, you can use that. You can do the same thing with Page Reprint links too, if you offer PDF reprints.

For a real world example, here’s the North Carolina State University’s Student Media take on it : The Technician’s collection of Barack Obama photos.

A quick way to send a short URL link to a specific image:

When a customer sends in a request for a photo, you’ll want to send them back a link to the file they’re looking for. There are several ways to do just that – but the best way, the way that yields the shortest possible URL – is the short URL alias that Fotobroker provides – called a “quicklink.”

To use them, all you need is the UID of the photo in question. The UID (or Unique Identifier #) is displayed in several places. You can check your photo details page (it’s also always in the Admin’s display). Feel free to call for site specific help. Once you have that number, (in our example here, I’ll use “001”) – just type your URL “reprints.mydomain.com” add “/sp/” and then the specific number.

If you’re a manager or a photo editor struggling to get a photo staff (especially a collegiate staff) to maintain a consistent approach to the metadata and upload tasks for your Fotobroker site, we have some advice for you.

• Make it Official – As consistent usage of your Fotobroker site yields both an excellent online archive and a revenue stream, we can say with confidence that it’s worth the time to do it. We’ve seen some papers get better compliance simply by writing the upload and archive process into the job description as a mandatory part of the responsibility. For college papers struggling with this, it’s worth noting that your photographers will likely be expected to archive (and probably upload for resale as well) once they get to a “real-world” newspaper staff.
• Set an example – Visible administration support for the site can go a long way… If you’re running a vigorous and consistent program of promoting your site, it’s harder for your staffers to “forget” about uploading and archiving tasks. A strong presence for the site internally (framed sample prints in your front office, for example, or coffee mugs for the receptionists) can make a big difference – for both “staffer awareness” and your sales.

If you’re new to the whole idea of selling reprints online with a Fotobroker setup, here’s an explanation of some your options when setting up a new site. It’s a question we’ve been asked a lot lately, as many sites move away from the full-integration of look and feel that has characterized our customers” sites in years past.

I wrote this explanation for a collegiate customer, but it applies generally to the industry and is especially true for small – or chronically understaffed – newspapers.

Here’s a little bit more information about the basic types of Fotobroker sites that we see most often. The titles are a little misleading, as even our most basic install is visually tied to your existing site.

Last summer, we ran a piece on this blog about the XMP/IPTC metadata standards that included a link to a datasheet from iptc.org that explained - step by step - how to automate adding this information with Photoshop.

We’d certainly encourage you to take a look at the IPTC’s published information on the subject, but here’s the highlight of that previous piece’s mention of Photoshop metadata automation:

Iptc4xmpCore_1.0-doc-CpanelsUserGuide_13.pdf (600kb PDF download)

Fred E. at NC State brought an important tip for users of Adobe Lightroom to our attention the other day. It seems that Lightroom uses a different naming convention for IPTC data than Photoshop does. Here’s his breakdown of some critical name changes that you should be aware of - the Photoshop header is first, followed by the nomenclature that Lightroom uses. The fields work the same way.

PHOTOSHOP --> LIGHTROOM
Author/Byline --> Creator
Description --> Caption
Provider/Credit --> Provider
Supplemental categories --> Other categories

If you’ve got questions, don’t hesitate to ask - we’re here to help.
And thanks, Fred! We owe you one.

For those of our clients using Apple Mac OS X 10.4 and beyond - and we know there are a lot more of you these days:

We found another way to use software you already have - Apple’s Automator - and a free downloadable action file from Peter Dekkers" website - called "Upload to FTP" - to automatically upload your image files every day. Apple users already have Applescript, of course, which is a powerful tool in the right hands, but Automator is a pretty good choice for those who’d rather not do it the hard(er) way.

You just download and install the action - very quick - tell it which folder to watch and let it go. You can run it with a click - two, actually - or schedule it with a shell script. We’ve added file filters (jpgs only!) to the version we use around here on our Macs, but let us know if you come up with something cool and automatic and we’ll post it here.

In the long term, paying close attention to file data can be one of the most important things you do for your company. And I know it’s not easy. If this isn’t your first trip to this blog, you’ve heard me sing this song before.

If you’re having trouble keeping up with all the metadata that should beattached to every image you create, you’re not alone. But we have some good news for you, especially if you’re an Adobe Photoshop user.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (iptc.org) – who are the people who came up with our last set of file-tagging conventions (IPTC file headers) – has updated the standard (it’s not new, the docs were released in 2005) – and it’s being used now in Adobe applications. The “IPTC Core schema for XMP” standards document describes the care and feeding of your metadata – we snagged a copy of it from the IPTC site for you to see:

At the risk of sounding a lot like your parents (who probably can’t run Photoshop for beans), we’d sure like to encourage you to fill out your file information completely. It will build your character, we promise. In the long run, it’s a way of "future proofing" your assets, too, because there’s no telling how you’ll using those assets down the road.

Your customers sometimes search for photos by "name, " so when they’re trying to find something and they can’t (using a quick search, anyway) - because there’s no name data to find - you could even lose a sale. Not good. But it’s worse than that... because aside from the obvious financial aspects, it’s also harder for you to find that file again.

Our marketing department doesn’t talk a lot about it, but Fotobroker can really be a pretty sweet archiving setup (for free, essentially, and with very good server uptime and availability numbers) - so combined with strong captioning, you have the makings of a real time-saver when it comes to tracking down published works - for sale or for your use.

We know it’s easy to overlook the emailed "Upload Report" you get whenever new files are imported into your database. It’s worth your time to skim it, though, because the details of every imported file are listed there. If there’s a problem, the report will tell you what caused it. The import restrictions are there for your protection (only images you own can be imported, for example) or to help you keep quality standards high (only RGB .jpg photos can be imported).

That little email can tip you off to problems in your workflow that affect more than just your image sales. At the very least, you’re helping to assure the viability of your assets in the future by making sure all your best work is available, properly labeled and ready for re-use.

If you have questions about why an image wasn’t imported, please ask. Wrong filetypes and missing copyright information are easy problems to remedy, once you know there’s a problem.

Fotobroker is an online image management and retail system made to meet the needs of publishing and photography professionals. This blog aims to answer questions for our customers and help them to make the most of their online assets.

To start, we’re breaking the site down into three areas:

’TechTalk" is where we explain aspects of the system, teach you to customize it, and show you how to solve issues with your files.