Berlin, well organized with Pictures

Thousands of new images per month need to be organized and used

Customer: Senate Administration for Urban Development

Customer Requirements

Berlin is Germany's capital and, at the same time, also its largest city. To no surprise, the senate's administration for urban development staff, organized across 10 departments and several affiliated institutions, have a broad spectrum of charters. Beyond general planning and conceptual work, this includes supervising street and bridge work, and taking care of nature protection and landscape conservation. Along with all these different tasks, documentation is of overall high importance.

Several thousand photos are being produced per month. After introducing digital photography, the amount of photos has grown rapidly to over 120 thousand photos at this point.

Individual departments used to produce photos without any coordination, and in short time had flooded the general file systems. This not only posed an immense problem for the archiving and backup processes, but also meant that users practically had no access to these images, as no categorization and search criteria was available. Also, any attempt to integrate the information systems of the different departments, such as the system to manage the information on the public gardens (GRIS), was simply impossible at this point.

Creation, Documentation and Filing of the digital photos had not been regulated until a Digital Asset Management solution was put in place. There were also no defined criteria to clarify the scheduling and prioritizing of the photo shoots. Therefore, photos were often taken multiple times in the same location or of the same subject. This situation had to be improved; a technical and organizational solution had to be found.

Goals

Dedicated management and archiving solution for the high volume of photos
Clearly defined and system-controlled processes for creating, naming and categorizing images
Easy access to all photos

Solution

By introducing a Digital Asset Management server, a central platform was created which enabled users to catalog and manage the images. The solution was enhanced with required configuration and custom development work to meet specific customer demands.

To manage their image catalogs, each of the departments nominated administrators, who were assigned clearly defined responsibilities. A central catalog and keyword structure was created, and intensive training was provided as part of the introduction of the new technology.

Access to the central system is now possible via desktop applications as well as web browsers. Users that provide photos are now guided to categorize them. In this context, a feature that is of special importance is the ability to tag photos with their street addresses, according to an existing database of Berlin addresses. This allows mapping photos to regions, sectors and project areas. Also, by providing separate libraries for different kinds of photos, the system can offer the search criteria and keywords that fit the content. This not only simplifies the provisioning of photos, but entire libraries are now available for the various departments via the intranet or internet.

Currently, the system is available over the entire extranet of the Berlin administration.