Image management
Images are an indispensable element of all media asset management systems.
Introduction
In censhare, images are treated as assets of a dedicated type and as such possess all the capabilities as other assets: workflow management, collaboration tools, variants, versioning, hierarchical relations and so on, providing all the functionality that one would expect from a modern image archiving system. Additional features provide particular support for image related data, as listed below:
Image analysis
Incoming image files are carefully analyzed by the system. The mime type is evaluated by file content where possible, otherwise by filename extension. Resolution, size, and colorspace of an image are recognized and stored as searchable metadata. Existing metadata in an image in any of the standards "EXIF", "IPTC" and "XMP" is recognized by the system and can be parsed and converted into metadata fields by means of a fully customizable metadata-mapper instruction. An intelligent multi-byte parser solves common encoding conflicts in these metadata. Frequent metadata-conversions are included in the system’s defaults.
An additional viewer allows to manually explore the raw metadata of any imported file at any time.
Previews
The system provides downsampled previews of all image files in the system, for the purpose of visually browsing in the gallery mode of the censhare clients, or to present thumbnails in the query results and asset planning. By default, the system produces a bigger preview with 1000 pixels on the long edge, and a thumbnail preview with 250 pixels in JPEG format of all image assets in the system. All these parameters are customizable. The previews are generated by the server, not the client, and are stored as additional storage items in the asset. They are accessible for export purposes.
censhare’s image capabilities also include the possibility to render watermarks into the previews. This can be done in addition to the default previews. Client customization features allow to control which kind of preview is shown to which kind of user.
Image Editing
Usually, images are opened from censhare to be treated with standard tools like Photoshop or Gimp. Client customization allows to fine control which client application is to be used for which mime type.
censhare optionally comes with its own simplified image editing application. The purpose of this tool is to provide a fast possibility to execute tasks that are typically done by editorial people, as cropping, flipping, rotating and resizing of images and that do not require the detour to some external sophisticated image editing application. The actual image rendering is done on the server-side and the censhare image editor is also available in the censhare WebClient.
Since censhare’s image editing capabilities are implemented on the server-side, these services are also available for some of the server modules. It is possible to execute the tasks mentioned in the paragraph before, plus some additional tasks like saving into other mime types or colorspaces, in batch mode, at certain times or at certain events. For example: if an image reaches a certain workflow step, it is possible to create a copy of the master file, resized and converted to RGB, as additional storage item for online purposes. censhare’s content export allows to use the image editing tools for the creation of on-the-fly export images.
It is also common to integrate specialized 3rd party tools for image editing and censhare’s hotfolder features allow for smooth integration with these systems.
Layout images
censhare allows to automatically generate low-resolution variants of an image for layouting purposes. This is typically used in environments, where the network bandwidth between the layout workstation and the censhare server is significantly limited. By placing images with a lower resolution, less data has to be transmitted throughout the layout process. For final approval or shortly before typesetting the layout document, the layout-images have to be replaced with the original version.
censhare has its own layout-image renderer, but also supports the Helios OPI products.
Image Machines
censhare integrates a couple of tools to accomplish the built-in image editing tasks. Supported, tightly integrated systems are JAI, ImageMagick and Helios OPI. Batch image editing can cause high loads on the server. For this reason, censhare allows to distribute the image rendering instances among multiple machines in the network.