Image Server under Mac OS X

I work at a publishing firm that employs around 25 photographers that feed 14 publications with photos. The followed method in providing publications with photos is very reactive, as the photographers wait for a request for photos and then they transfer the photos over the LAN/WAN to the publication.<br><br>There was a project in the IT department that would solve that issue for us, but it's been on constant delays.. <br><br>I'm now searching for an image server that we can run internally on our intranet and have the publications access the terabytes of photos with a web browser.. Can anybody recommend any solution?<br><br>Mac OS X is preferred, but is not mandatory..<br>Many thanks..<br><br>[color:blue]flick</font color=blue>[color:red]r</font color=red>

Alot of places we work with use Xinet Webnative:<br><br>link<br><br>Check it out, might be just what you're looking for!<br><br><br>Hey I'm an F'n Jerk!®

Looks very good, thanks <br><br>[color:blue]flick</font color=blue>[color:red]r</font color=red>

One thing to consider is how much you want to spend on the solution. We use Extensis Portfolio Server and clients in our department of 18 people. A year's service contract for the server and 10 concurrent clients is $1,200.00 for education. Quite a bit more for regular licenses. The problem is, Extensis can be a bit slow to upgrade and fix bugs. But the price is lower. They also have a SQL Server version, but I wouldn't recommend that. If I had to do it over, I'd probably consider some of the alternatives, but for a server/client setup there isn't much in this price range.<br><br>We also use Artesia (used to be Artesia Teams) for our whole company (non-profit). Discovery HD and Disney, Getty and others use it. We're the smallest installation they have ever done. And it cost us about a half million bucks. We're about to upgrade to the latest version. It has a lot going for it, but you really need a very skilled C++/Java programmer to run it. And you should run it on Sun servers and Oracle, not Windows Server. (We were their first there too.) <br><br>Be careful to find out just exactly what it does, how it handles metadata (extracting them and automatically filling in metadata fields is a MUST), what access you have to the images. Can you use it to place photos in Quark/InDesign? And find out what it takes to customize it. That's where Artesia gets you. It's very customizable, but only to skilled programmers. It's way too complex for small operations. Again, if it were up to me, I would have gone for something a little more "canned." But it works once we get the customizations in place.<br><br>Portfolio is mostly useable, but can be quite maddening sometimes. And still too many bugs in Leopard. But once you have it working, it's solid and fast.<br><br>Sorry if that wasn't all that helpful. <br><br>Eric<br><br>I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it. - Mark Twain<br>

Thanks Eric, I've always wondered what Getty used.. Artesia's solution is probably an overkill for us, not to mention that we don't have programmers on board with us.. Portfolio was one of the first solutions we evaluated, but it does not support a thin client (web browser).<br><br>XINET looks pretty good, feature-wise.. Our IT people are looking at it and forming questions for our demo session. We need to see possible integration with our future content management system and WAN deployment with cache servers (our publishing firm has branches in 20 countries).<br><br>All information is helpful <br><br>[color:blue]flick</font color=blue>[color:red]r</font color=red>

<blockquote><font size=1>In reply to:</font><hr><p><br>XINET looks pretty good, feature-wise.. Our IT people are looking at it and forming questions for our demo session. We need to see possible integration with our future content management system and WAN deployment with cache servers (our publishing firm has branches in 20 countries).<p><hr></blockquote><p><br>AFAIK, Webnative is pretty much a complete content/workflow management system on it's own so you might want them to look at it in that direction as well.<br><br>Like I mentioned, we have quite a few customers that use it, from very large corporations to small design shops. It can be fantastic, or terrible, all depends on how much they put into it on their end. I keep pushing them to use it here.<br><br><br>Hey I'm an F'n Jerk!®

I hope XINET works for you. It looks like it has a lot of great features. Just make sure it's bullet-proof and doesn't require constant babysitting. <br><br>Also make sure it's smart about importing metadata. Nothing worse than having to enter metadata from a spreadsheet or manually!<br><br>Yeah. Artesia is pretty heavy-duty. Getty has about 100 million images in it. And it has a lot of holes. Like you can't print reports from the metadata. How dumb is that for a half million dollar piece of software? <br><br><br><br><br><br>Eric<br><br>I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it. - Mark Twain<br>

I had seen this program awhile ago. Not sure if it has what you need<br>http://www.mediaboardone.com/<br><br><br><br>For Mike

Thanks Lori.. The solution I'm looking for MUST have a web/browser interface to search and retrieve the photos from, and the one you suggested seems to only generate web galleries.<br><br>On the other hand, I missed seeing you around, how are you and yours <br><br>[color:blue]flick</font color=blue>[color:red]r</font color=red>