iPhotoLive’s Photography Workflow: Designed for Mass Distribution

iPhotoLive’s Photography Workflow: Designed for Mass Distribution

A photographer’s workflow is an art, and each handles the journey of an image from capture to delivery in his or her own way. Here at PhotoShelter we get tons of questions from photographers about workflow – whether it’s what we recommend, what our system can handle, or even what we do personally.

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To shed some light on different types of real-life workflows, I sat down with a number of our subscribers over the last few weeks and got the dish on what’s working for them.

I present the first subject in our “Photography Workflow” series:  iPhotoLive, a division of the full-service photo agency iPhoto Inc.

I was calling it the “File Blaster Workflow” for a while, and I thought it sounded goofy, so I stopped using it. But now that I think about it, I like it again.

iPhotoLive.com needs to deliver images from entertainment events, and meeting the deadlines of their many clients is their main workflow objective. Their clients are the entertainment media — magazines (such as People, US Weekly, OK, In Style, Stylewatch, Bauer Group, etc.), entertainment websites, entertainment TV-shows, and newspapers with entertainment sections.

In order to get their images out to their clients, they use PhotoShelter’s FTP Export feature to simultaneously distribute (or “blast”) these files directly into  their clients’ image archives. (Warning: Do not try this from your home cable or DSL connection. 🙂 )

According to iPhotoLive’s Alex Urosevic, their workflow starts with Photo Mechanic for editing, which includes entering IPTC data for the best images in each shoot. After this, the will open the images in Photoshop, tweak and crop them if needed and then uploaded to PhotoShelter via FTP.

Once inside the PhotoShelter Archive Browser, iPhotoLive editors will do a quality control check on the images to ensure that they look good, and contain the right IPTC data.  Once they pass this step, a PhotoShelter gallery is created and made publicly searchable, making the images available right from the PhotoShelter-powered iPhotoLive.com website.

But they don’t wait for clients to come to the website. They will push all of the files from each shoot, via FTP export, directly to each of their regular clients — and there are a LOT of them. To manage this easier, all of the FTP destinations are pre-set in PhotoShelter, so the process is much quicker.

Once the images are transferred, clients get a follow-up phone call or email to alert them that new images are waiting for them in their systems.

In addition to screening all the magazines, they will get usage reports from clients showing how each image was used, and from this they create monthly invoices using a program they had custom made.

See what I mean? “File Blaster” is the right name for this, don’t you think?

Go see all the images on the iPhotoLive website.

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PhotoShelter co-founder and GM

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