During a staff meeting this week one of my colleagues mentioned that he noted that a MerlinOne customer had received over 5,000 images in an hour. Wow, that’s a lot of pictures to edit. Of course, there is a sporting event in London going on right now, and so it would be expected that there would be an increased amount of photographic content flowing to our newspaper customers. Their Merlin digital asset management tools not only kept up with the inputs, Merlin could have handled more.
Our Merlin 5 rich client gives picture editors the tools they need to efficiently go through large volumes of pictures on deadline to find just the right ones to publish.
This made me curious, so I went and looked at some statistics for some of our customers.
One customer has received over 350,000 items over the last ten days. That averages, of course, to 35,000 per day. Another, over 150,000 photos in the same 10-day time frame. That’s a lot of pictures to look at. During one 24-hour period this particular customer saw over 24,000 pictures. That does not match the 5,000/hour noted by our customer service team, but that is still a lot of pictures to manage in a very short period of time. It should be noted that Merlin can process in excess of 7,000 images per hour, so it was no surprise that we kept up with the Olympic-sized volume.
The Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” While the athletes do their part to live up to the motto, MerlinOne, in our own way, helps our customers live up to it as well. Certainly the “Faster” portion.
Not only did our customers store huge numbers of pictures every day of the Olympics, because we index new content and associated metadata on the fly as part of the import process, pictures can be searched for immediately, cropped in Merlin, and made available to other users, services and production systems. Using Merlin tools, editors at some of the largest newspapers in the world are able to find that gold medal photo for their web site or their front page.