Welcome to Collections Picture Library

Supplying digital pictures to Collections
Last updated 15/08/08

INTRODUCTION

These guidelines assume that the pictures will ultimately be printed by a four colour litho printer on ordinary coated paper, the kind of reproduction method used by book and magazine publishers, since this makes up the vast majority of our sales.

If you have been browsing the web site then you may have noticed that some photographers are much better represented than others. This is partly because some photographers are much more prolific, but mostly it is because a handful have started supplying us with material digitally.

It is an unfortunate fact, but the photographers supplying digitally are going to get more of their pictures on-line quicker than those that are not. If you have the facilities and time then we can arrange for you to have your pictures back for you to scan, but we would have to be satisfied that this was going to be done within a reasonable period and at a decent quality. Where a client has asked for a high resolution scan off a transparency, this scan is done without charge to either client or photographer. If you do not have scanning facilities we may arrange for a selection of a photographers work to be scanned for our library for which a fee will be charged, should a photographer request it.

It does take a long time to process digital submissions and the closer you follow the guidelines the quicker I will be able to turn your pictures round. Scans that require a lot of extra work will be delayed and in some instances may be rejected all together! I will always contact a contributor if there is a problem with a submission with suggestions as to how it can be improved in future.

There have only been a dozen or so contributors who have registered with the new site. You can of course do a simple search which you don’t have to register for, but to check out your own pictures, if there are any, you will have to register. If you do not know the address it is www.collectionspicturelibrary.co.uk and select Register from the quick links menu.

If your name is not listed then we have not yet got round to scanning any of your work, it does not mean we have dropped you from the library!

For the foreseeable future we will continue operating as an analogue library, sending out your transparencies to clients, but this is now rare. Most requests these days are via our e-commerce site www.collectionspicturelibrary.co.uk or are sent by email in the form of a digital lightbox. Transparencies are included in the lightboxes at present.

How digital contributions are handled

The first thing that happens when a contributor’s disc arrives is it’s contents are transferred to a local hard disk using a Photoshop batch command, this uses a script to check the file is over our minimum size, look for bad formatting in the keywords, sort out some formatting issues in the caption, replace any characters that may be problematic when the pictures are uploaded and adds our own contact details.

Then the pictures are edited in Adobe Bridge and, if necessary, corrected. This usually just means scanning through them to check they are not too light or dark or over saturated, but in some cases we might correct converging parallels, remove blemishes such as discarded rubbish and, rarely, fix pictures that have been ineptly retouched by the contributor.

Next we go through and check the captions and keywords for spelling errors and possibly supplement the keywords if important entries have been omitted. We add our own reference number and the photographer credits if they were left off.

Next we use another Photoshop script that re-sizes the picture to the size that will be uploaded, renames the file with our own reference number, copies the caption and keywords to a data file and saves the picture as a jpeg.

Finally the pictures are uploaded to the web site and the data file is checked over before it too is uploaded.

I would be interested to hear from contributing photographers, either to correct my assertions or to add to the above. Simon@collectionspicturelibrary.com

Simon Shuel