Digitalab's Sparrow allows photographers to review and share image files, as well as offering backup and security.Digitalab Solutions has launched Sparrow, a hosted digital asset management solution focused on the needs of the commercial photography industry.
The company also resells the product in a "white box" version to its customers and to other photographic service bureaus, which can be relabeled to improve the service that photographers can offer to their clients.
Now that digital photography has almost entirely replaced film-based photography for commercial work, the photographic service business is adapting by offering a broad range of digital support services in place of traditional offerings.
Hosted digital asset management is one way of creating new revenue streams and offering services to photographers and their clients that are more appropriate to today's digital workflows.
Digitalab decided to create its own application rather than hosting an existing digital asset management package, they said, because they believe that creative photographers need a friendly, hospitable work environment and don't want to be bothered with technical headaches.
"These are creative people whose minds are all about the emotional impact of the imagery," said Jim Ingram, President of the Digitalab Solutions.
"We enable them to take great pictures, and we take the hassle away. They just focus on their subject, they focus on the lighting, they focus on the models and keeping the vibe on the set ... it's seamless to them. They don't want to be technologists; they want us to take care of that."
The system enables photographers to review, sort and approve a collection of images from a day's shoot, then share those images with clients and have prints or DVDs of the images shipped off via a shopping cart-style fulfillment solution
Click here to read more about the business case for digital asset management.
But digital asset management is only part of what the company offers. "We're really a complete solution for digital photographers," said Mr. Ingram, whose company offers state-of-the-art rental studios for photo shoots, equipment rental, consulting and a full range of IT support for professional digital photography.
The company also manages capture, backup and security of the files that clients create, moving enormous image files over a fast fiber network to multi-terabyte RAID arrays in distant offices for safety and wide availability over the Internet.
The company's decision to offer private-label versions of Sparrow to photographers is an effort help the whole business grow. "If we can have tools that can advance our customers' business ... it's only going to benefit DLS as we see their business grow."
Sam Bekman, Product Manager of the Sparrow system, said he believes that this initiative is just the beginning of the range of services his company hopes to provide. "It's not only an asset management system," he said. "Sparrow has become a project management tool. It streamlines workflow."
Now that commercial photographers routinely shoot thousands and thousands of images in a single session, an efficient workflow has become an important bottom-line proposition.
And what will become of traditional photographic service providers?
"They're going to be left behind," Ingram said. "The viable business is in the support structure. If you're not intelligently driving the workflow and enabling customers' businesses who need digital photography, whether that's the dot-coms, whether that's the retailers, whether that's the advertising agencies, you're going to be left behind."
