Image Content Management for Enterprise iPhone Users

by Bill French on 18/05/09 at 9:59 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

While SmugMug is the clear winner for managing and sharing personal and professional photographs, there are few solutions that provide a robust security model and other business-level features that enterprises will be comfortable with. Growing adoption of Apple computing products in marketing and advertising, with emphasis on design, photography, and video production, has placed additional pressure on service providers to integrate the iPhone, and SmugMug has wisely taken such steps by providing a native client.

Seamless iPhone Integration

In the category of social imagery capture and management, SmugMug engineers deliver an iPhone experience that demonstrates why this device is a “game-changer”. This app is simple, elegant, and super productive to use. But this isn’t surprising – when you start playing with SmugMug in your desktop browser, it becomes quickly apparent that the designers are in a whole new class of application builders. Even their early Safari UI is a delight to use.

The official SmugMug iPhone app is designed for one thing – capturing, tagging (geo support as well), uploading, and sharing photos into a SmugMug account. SmugWallet ($2.99), a third-party app that leverages the SmugMug API, makes it possible to access your entire SmugMug collection from your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can also integrate Eye-Fi with your SmugMug account to automatically stream newly captured photos directly to your account.

Managing Image Resources in the Cloud

SmugMug also recognizes the need for bundling and protecting related artifacts such as raw files, TIFFs, and other resources related to a specific photo project. SmugVault provides extended [cloud-based] archive services that are secure and reliable. Nominal extra apply, but these services pay big dividends in security, safety, and productivity

Image Management Requirements in Social Computing

Arguably, social computing is as much about pictures as it is about text; if a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s also worth about 75 tweets. 140 characters doesn’t hold a candle to a good photo so it’s no surprise that services such as SnapTweet, TwitPic, and Flickr are so popular. But marketing organizations that participate in social media for business purposes have requirements that transcend the collection of loosely coupled web services individuals so quickly become comfortable with.

Many companies are painting themselves into a corner by adopting a plethora of free image hosting services as they blog, tweet, and publish official business content. Photo’s, logo’s and other resources are scattered across many sites and a unified image resource management strategy is necessary to avoid minor and major catastrophes.

Here are the six important business requirements you should consider for your image resource management requirements.

Persistence Control – Free image services are risky; there’s no explicit contract to perform. Paid services – especially those design for professional photographers – are required to perform under the agreed-upon terms. Furthermore, marketing teams cannot afford to have their image resources vanish overnight leaving hundreds or thousands of URLs busted.
Brand Control – Free image services provide little control over brand. In fact, they typically display ads to earn compensation to support their services. If your social computing objective is to build brand reputation, the last thing you want to do is confuse or distort the marketing message with text and image ads, especially when they may be competitive ads.
Quality Control – Imagine if Twitter slightly altered the text of your tweets before publishing them to the timeline. This is not fundamentally different from a picture-hosting service altering the resolution or aspect ratio of a photo or logo for presentation. Businesses need services that show precisely what was intended by the photographer.
Security – Social computing is (for the most part) a public endeavor; the content is by design, neither sensitive or regarded as a security issue. But like all business messaging, organizations are at risk if the content can be easily modified.
Mobile Agility – Marketing and public relations professionals are mobile; always on the move and in many cases working from an iPhone. The ability to capture and organize visual content resources on-the-fly is increasingly important to meet business marketing objectives.
Project Resource Bundling – There are typically lots of different image resources in any marketing project. Enterprises must have a way to “bundle” files for intuitive organization and management. Free services fail to recognize this requirement and before long, you have hundreds of files in one unmanageable list.

While SmugMug meets these requirements and more, it’s a good idea to develop your own business requirements for image content management and then decide on an implementation approach.