Images communicate your design beliefs to the outside world. Brochures, lectures and presentations to clients are the platforms you use to promote your ideas and win new business.
Few businesses rely as heavily on images as architectural practices. Architectural projects can live or die on the quality of presentational material so it is no surprise that architects are heavy users of PowerPoint, Photoshop and other graphic solutions. But the recent explosion in the use of digital imagery has created searching inefficiencies and duplication problems that can make locating the right image in the right format a logistical nightmare.
Hidden assets
Picture the scene: you're the principal architect at a major international partnership. You've got a crucial tender bid in the morning, and you're working late preparing a visual presentation. You'd like to use some images from your company brochure but the graphic designers have all gone home and you don't know where the low-resolution versions are.
You can only find the unwieldy hi-res images, which you decide to put in your PowerPoint anyway and then experience all the problems associated with having images that are too large inside an application. Your computer refuses to print it and you daren't email it to anyone.
Alternatively, you work in the marketing department of a practice that has just bid successfully on a high profile new football stadium and you have the media chasing you for images.
You know there are a variety of images from numerous site visits, not to mention the beautiful, photo-real visualisations that went some way towards winning the project in the first place: perfect for that before and after magazine feature but you don't know what the image files are called, or which ones the directors want you to use. And the magazine is about to go to press.
Maybe you're the IT manager whose task it is to ensure that digital images are managed properly. The images form a hefty proportion of what is being stored on your servers but no matter how many directives you issue you don't seem to be able to stop the marketing team or the project architects from renaming image files or creating their own mini image databases on the network.
Images help you deliver your projects on time, on budget and to the highest standard but these images get lost, misplaced or duplicated over and over again. Managing them effectively saves not just time but money, as it enables employees to spend less time locating images and more time working on current projects.
It also brings peace of mind as you can rest assured that you're always looking at the best images of a given project. Re-purposing is another key issue. Most images could and should be used in different ways throughout the practice but this can only happen if people know what exists and where to find it. We believe digital asset management is the answer.
Order of the day
In essence, digital asset management is a return to the days of managing your images in a slide drawer. Before architects started storing digital images on servers they had two image management tools: the slide drawer and a briefcase. The slide drawer was the place they went to find images. They would flick through the drawer, select the slides that were needed and then put them inside a briefcase before leaving the practice to go and give a lecture or presentation.
A digital asset management solution like OpenAsset emulates that process. The way in which you search for images - the slide drawer - is the database, which is organised by keywords, project codes, copyrights, photographers and captions. And the digital era equivalent of the briefcase is the application: the place you put the images or how you use them.
What we tend to find when talking to architects or directors is that they are heavily dependent on someone else in the business knowing where the images are or how they should be used.
They don't have any tools that allow them to search for the images they want, organise them by project code or keyword and make them available to the people that need them: the graphics team or the marketing department or whoever is ultimately responsible for creating the PowerPoint or brochure once the images have been chosen.
However, with the advent of solutions like OpenAsset it is incredibly easy to search, organise and publish images. The system assumes the responsibility for managing images and other digital assets associated with architectural projects and tenders.
Images are searched for via a standard web browser interface and can be collected for output and automatically converted to the appropriate size and format for use in various applications as and when they are needed. Wasteful replication is thus avoided: the high res master is stored only once on the server.
Managing your digital assets effectively will enable the marketing team, the people responsible for publishing the images, quickly to find the images that the director has selected for publication, burn them on to a CD or download them as a ZIP file and send them to the journalist.
Avoiding duplication
The issue of duplication - a major headache for IT managers - can also be addressed. For example, all the images are stored onsite on a central server and it is impossible to check the same image into the system more than once.
Access privileges determine who can view the images and the problem of people creating their own image libraries on their desktops is solved by a facility which allows the creation of user-specific albums where individual users can organise and save the images they need.
Digital asset management takes the strain by storing images and digital files into easy to access categories, chosen by you and your team, and providing improved organisation, cataloguing and management of your digital assets.
Essentially this means that your marketing team can get on with promoting your work, the IT manager is absolved of his librarian duties and the architects have more time to get on with the more important task of creating amazing buildings.
