iView MultiMedia Press Release

iView MediaPro’s new Alamy Wizard speeds professional photographers’ time to market

LONDON, Jan. 30, 2006 – Professional photographers must no longer endure the cumbersome and time consuming submission process to market their images via online stock photography services. A pioneering collaboration between image cataloguing software developer iView Multimedia and stock photography service Alamy has radically reduced the time required by professional photographers to prepare images for sale online. The Alamy Wizard ­– a new addition to iView MediaPro 3.0, the award winning, cross-platform, digital asset management and cataloguing solution for photographers and creative professionals – simplifies the stock photo submission process into just three easy steps.

At present each stock photography service has its own way of tagging and cataloguing images so that customers can find appropriate images easily. Thus photographers must laboriously provide individual file identifiers, tags and descriptions for each image they wish to market on a stock photography service.

Alamy and iView Multimedia identified a common cause to make it easier and faster for photographers to get images to market. This resulted in iView Multimedia developing the Alamy Wizard which integrates both companies’ tagging and cataloguing systems.

Once images have been edited and photographers ensure that files meet Alamy’s technical criteria, photographers using the latest version of MediaPro simply need to:

  1. Use the Alamy Wizard to validate images for submission to Alamy. The wizard collates the photos for submission and creates a text data file named “Package Index.txt”.
  2. Photographers then use their preferred CD or DVD burning software to burn the collated images to disk and post the disk to Alamy.
  3. When photographers log in to the “Prepare images for sale” area on www.alamy.com, and see their submitted images displayed they simply e-mail the Package Index file to [email protected].

Alamy then applies the data in the Package Index file to the images and sends the photographers a report. The images then go on sale.

Yan Calotychos, Managing Director of iView Multimedia said, “By listening to and understanding the needs of pro photographers, we know that they want a more efficient way to sell their images via online stock photography services. The Alamy Wizard is another tool in MediaPro 3.0 that empowers professional photographers to manage their creativity, working smarter and more efficiently. Alamy is a perfect partner for us because they share our philosophy of enabling photographers the freedom to work the way they want to.”

Alan Capel, Head of Content at Alamy said, “We want Alamy to be the largest and fastest search engine for stock photography. Providing pro photographers with an easier and faster way to place images with us increases our catalogue and widens our appeal to customers. MediaPro is a very effective cataloguing solution, and now fits technically as well as philosophically with Alamy.”

About iView Multimedia
iView Multimedia is a software development and publishing company based in London, U.K. Its flagship product, iView MediaPro, is the leading digital asset cataloging solution for creative professionals who need to streamline their processes, shorten time to market, and eliminate costs from the production cycle. iView MediaPro locates, captures, organizes, annotates, searches, retrieves and presents digital content, quickly and easily. The software integrates seamlessly into the creative professional’s established workflow.
Since its first product release in 1996, iView has attracted a reputation for market-leading innovations in the digital asset management market. It continues to enhance this reputation, and its products are widely recognized as best-of-breed.