Its not often us ‘techies’ get the opportunity to write a blog, or any content for our website for that matter. This is generally due to the fact that we have no social skills and what we do talk about or write sounds and looks like gibberish to the average reader. So when we are allowed to write something, its worth taking note, as It must be good for the powers that be to let us out of our little cupboard into the world with the rest of you. egoFolio – Brandmovers’ asset management system – is such a project.

For those of you who have not heard of egoFolio, it is currently being used as a photo management system by a major international Photo Agency based in the UK, and has been in development since June 2010. But what does that actually mean? Well imagine having a system which allows photographers to take photos of your favourite celebrity and then within minutes, upload those photos via a dynamically created FTP account or secure web interface so they can be sold to media companies for use in their material.

OK so it does not sound that impressive yet, there must be a million systems that do this sort of thing. So lets imagine a system where each user has permission to only access and manage just their photos; that on uploading new photos, egoFolio automatically reads XMP, IPTC and EXIF meta data from the images (hidden content stored within the image describing who took it, what its about and location etc) and then lets you re-write that data back into the image when you publish. (including automatically branded with your companies name) Not only that, all images that have been uploaded have been branded with a watermark automatically.

Still not impressed? You certainly are a tough crowd to please! Having the system do all this clever stuff is pointless if you are unable to sell these images to the media. egoFolio not only deals with the image, it then can be integrated with popular systems such as Distribution Manager, IDS and can be published to the egoFolio sales front end branded to your company. A full audit of where it has been sent Is stored within the system so if you can’t remember if you have sent it to an important newspaper, you can just read the image publish history.

Once a media company has decided to use your image there is no need to record that data separately, each user is given a commission percentage on creation of their account (which can be changed on a photo by photo basis) so when an image is sold you can enter the sales data directly into egoFolio and it will automatically let that user know an item has been sold and allow the administrators to generate sales reports so they can see what has been paid and what is still to be paid.

The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that at the start of this blog, I called egoFolio an asset management system rather than a photo management system, this is because egoFolio has been designed to also allow the management of other media as well. Want to sell video or audio? Simply turn on the egoFolio transcoding engine and when a person uploads a video or audio file, have it automatically converted to a playable format branded with your logo.

So what’s the future of egoFolio? The main focus at the moment is to make the accounting and reporting side a lot better. There is no point reinventing the wheel and since everybody uses Sage to run there accounts, why not link egoFolio directly up to Sage? (So if an image is marked as sold the system can send the information to sage to generate an invoice and then have Sage data passed back to egoFolio when an invoice is page.) Or what about the ability to manipulate the images directly in egoFolio? If you don’t like the drunken student who has decided to try to get in the paper and has managed to get his head in the picture simply crop it directly in the system.

We believe egoFolio has filled a gap in the asset management market, is unqiue, and is only going to get better, hopefully you agree (providing you understood this techie - who is now going to be hidden from the world for another year.)

If you are interested in egoFolio or have any questions, please contact one of our sales reps on 0844 2474 120 or email studio@brandmovers.co.uk. (Or even tweet us on @ricky_reeves or the company account @Brandmovers_uk.)

Ricky Reeves
Technical Director
Brandmovers Europe Limited