Getty starts preparing for the Olympic Games 7 years before the actual event. Seven years!
It would be so interesting to be a part of that process and see what an enormous amount of work goes into planning the workflow. This is what happens from the moment of taking the picture until it reaches the customer.
At the Event
Once the Olympic Games begin, the workflow is set. Each image—as an untreated JPEG—zooms from the photographer’s camera to the pressroom’s server network, where it’s accessed by photo editors using both Macs and PCs. “We have three stages to the production line,” Mainardis explains. “You have one editor whose only responsibility is to select the relevant frames.”
This is a fast but intensive stage: “If we’re shooting around about 1.5 million frames during the Olympics, we edit that down to no more than 85,000 finished images that will go out to the various services we provide.”
Any image that makes the cut is forwarded to the second editor. “We do some very minimal adjustments to color and contrast and usually a crop,” Mainardis says. These are done using conventional Adobe Photoshop programs. However, a proprietary software owned by Getty tags the images with some metadata—such as camera and exposure specs, dates, and locations—recorded by the camera: “Our software stamps each image with the data as it’s ingested into the network,” Mainardis says.
The final stage is to add specific data, such as names of athletes and details about the photos. This is applied by a third editor, who is also responsible for routing the picture to the relevant section of the Getty Images website and the proper transmission channels. “That third editor creates a narrative,” Mainardis says. “They’re finding the key elements of the story and the best standalone images, and then deciding where they are routed.”
Two Minutes Later
While all of the photos that make it this far land on the Getty Images website, many are also wired to specific markets. “The content can be tailored to the customer’s needs,” Mainardis says. “And we now offer an API [application program interface], where a customer can integrate their CMS [content management system] with the back end of our website. We’re pushing content directly into your system, so you can benefit from the speed that we’re moving it.”
Speed, indeed. “If the stars are aligned, that process—from the moment the shutter is pressed, through the image selection and Photoshop correction, to the moment the data is applied and sent across our internal network to our customers— happens in around 120 seconds,” Mainardis says. “Watching these guys work is like watching a musical orchestra. It’s incredible how slick and efficient they are, looking at enormous amounts of content.”
Read the full article over at Popular Photography.
Source: Popular Photography
