A recent email I received asked about way to just have some sort of in-house image management software—just enough to get the job done. So, I thought up a quick way to do this and I wanted to share it with you. It may not be the solution for everyone, but it’s functional.
If your organization runs Microsoft Office Suite then you’re probably familiar with the standard applications like Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. But did you know about Picture Manager? Picture Manager comes with that suite of products and allows you to do basic image management and manipulation. You can perform adjustments like brightness/contrast, color, red eye correction, rotating/flipping, and resizing. All of this is available on your desktop.
However, the way to make this a bit more useful is to set up a shared drive on your network that anyone can read and write to. Then get all of your employees to store their images on that shared drive. Every employee would then setup their Picture Manager software to locate pictures on that shared drive. Then your employees could drag and drop their images, edit, delete, etc as needed.
Again, it may not have workflow processes, and advanced image management and editing options, but if you’re looking to do it on the cheap (and who isn’t these days?!) then this may be the solution for you.
Note: This post is of my own personal opinion and does not constitute and endorsement of any product mentioned by any Federal, State, or Local government organization.
Good suggestion. At one time we had all of our photos/pics in a sharepoint library. Needless to say, no one has kept it up to date.
Why not use Picasa? Or Flickr?
Well, you could. But this particular email was about an in-house only, not third-party service, and without having to worry about NARA requirements. They just wanted to manage images they had internally and get a hold of them in a somewhat organized fashion.