Picture desk
How to write a news photo caption
A caption is not a label and it is not a summary of the story. It is the only place where a reader is told what they are actually looking at, and it is the first thing a lawyer reads when something goes wrong.
Sections
- Section
Picture desk
How pictures are commissioned, culled, captioned and cleared before a page closes — and what goes wrong when any of those steps is left to the end of the shift.
- Section
Asset management
Digital asset management as it is actually run: what makes a file an asset, how a library is structured so that it can still be searched a year later, and what is lost when one system is replaced by another.
- Section
Rights and licensing
What a licence permits, when a release is required, how pictures are resold — and why an archive with poor captions cannot be licensed at all.
- Section
Archives
Newspaper and picture archives: the decisions taken at digitisation that cannot be taken again, the formats that survive, and the media that no longer read.
- Section
Editorial workflow
Editorial production end to end — one library feeding print and screen, where content management stops and asset management begins, and what keeps publishing when a system does not.
- Section
Case studies
Deployments in newspaper, magazine, broadcast and corporate publishing, told from the record: the problem, the system put in, and the effect reported at the time.
- Section
News
General news for the media production trade, alongside the Picdar announcements kept from the original record.
Picture desk
All picture desk- New
What a picture desk actually does on deadline
Everyone knows the picture desk chooses the pictures. Almost nobody outside one knows that choosing is the smallest part of the job, and the part least…
29 September 2026
- New
How editors choose the lead image
The lead image is the only part of a story most readers will see. It appears in the feed, in the share card, on the section page and at the top of…
29 September 2026
- New
IPTC photo metadata: the fields that matter
An image file can carry dozens of metadata fields. A picture desk uses about eight of them, and a library that fills those eight well is more useful than…
29 September 2026
- New
What may be changed in a news photograph, and what may not
Every news photograph is processed. A raw sensor file is not publishable, and turning one into a printed or screen image involves a series of choices…
29 September 2026
Asset management
All asset management- New
Designing a DAM taxonomy that survives its first year
Most asset-library taxonomies are designed by the people doing the filing and used by the people doing the finding, and those are rarely the same people…
29 September 2026
- New
Migrating to a new asset library without losing the metadata
Files migrate reliably. Metadata does not. Every asset-library migration that goes wrong goes wrong in the same place: the images arrive intact and…
29 September 2026
- New
File naming conventions for media archives
A filename is the one piece of metadata that cannot be stripped. It survives export, email, re-encoding, and every system the file passes through on its…
29 September 2026
- New
Keywording images with a controlled vocabulary
Free-text keywording feels faster and produces a library that gets worse every month. Each person adds the terms that occur to them, each term arrives…
29 September 2026
Rights and licensing
All rights & licensing- New
Brand asset management, explained
Brand asset management is what happens when an organisation decides that the wrong version of its own logo appearing in public is a problem worth solving…
29 September 2026
- New
Rights-managed, royalty-free and editorial-only: what you are buying
Licensing a photograph buys a defined scope of permission. It does not buy the copyright, and it does not buy the picture.
29 September 2026
- New
Model and property releases: when you actually need one
A release is permission from a person to use their likeness, or from an owner to use their property, in a particular kind of publication. It is not…
29 September 2026
- New
Orphan works: publishing a photograph when nobody knows who took it
Every archive holds them. A print in a folder with no credit. A scan inherited from a title that closed. A negative in a box labelled with an event and…
29 September 2026
Archives
All archives- New
Digitising a newspaper archive: the decisions that cannot be undone
A digitisation project is mostly logistics, and about six decisions. The logistics can be corrected as you go. The decisions cannot, because reversing one…
29 September 2026
- New
File formats for keeping photographs for decades
A format choice made today will be read — or not read — by somebody with no access to today's software. That is the whole problem, and it is why…
29 September 2026
- New
Getting data off optical disk, tape and other dead media
Somewhere in every long-lived picture archive there is a shelf of discs and cartridges from the years when they were the obvious way to store images.…
29 September 2026
- New
How long copyright lasts in a photograph
The commonest mistake in a picture archive is assuming that an old photograph is free to use. Age is not the test, and a photograph from the 1930s can be…
29 September 2026
Editorial workflow
All workflow- New
Running print and web from one asset library
Most publications that do both ended up with two libraries by accident. The print operation had one first, the web operation built its own because…
29 September 2026
- New
Asset management and content management: where the boundary sits
Both systems hold images. Both have a search box, a permissions model and a version history. The question of which one should hold what is therefore asked…
29 September 2026
- New
Business continuity for a newsroom that still has to publish
Most continuity plans are written for organisations that can pause. A newsroom cannot. The deadline does not move because the asset library…
29 September 2026
- Archive 2005
Workflow tools: controlling the movement of assets
An obsession with workflow, inside asset management and around it.
Case studies
All case studies- Archive 2005
Mortons Media Group: a quantum leap in production management
Heritage magazine publishing, eight new titles in a year, and no increase in staffing.
- Archive 2005
TUI: brochures and web from one library
How Thomson Holidays removed six-figure repro costs from brochure production.
- Archive 2005
BBC Worldwide: a ten-year archive of 140,000 records
A cumbersome manual approach replaced, and new business opportunities opened.
- Archive 2005
The Economist: news, comment and opinion under one system
High-speed wires meant more incoming information than the old process could take.
News
All news- Archive
Picdar’s InDesign plug-in now faster, safer and easier to use
29 March 2004
- Archive
Camera Press previews new service at Picture Buyers Fair
11 May 2004
- Archive
Photoshop given more power with a new Media Mogul plug-in
14 May 2004
- Archive
Irish News switches to Picdar
5 December 2005
Vendor chronology
Twenty-one years of installations, taken word for word from the company’s own milestones page as it stood in 2005. Nothing has been added to it.
- 2005Picdar launches new versions of its workflow products including new Creative Suite plugins and Quark XTensions for both Mac OSX and PC NT platforms.
- 2004Picdar launches Media Mogul jSuite enterprise solution, engineered for J2EE
- 2003Top Euro IT analyst, Butler Group , say Picdar’s Media Mogul is an “ideal” enterprise content management solution, adding that Media Mogul is a well kept secret…
- 2002Appointment of Bharat Shah , former VP of Eastman Kodak , to develop expansion strategy.
- 2001Launch of new product suites:
- 2000Installation in travel market - Tui (previously Thomson Travel) - Launch of Media Mogul Digital Asset Management product suite
- 1999Delivery of asset management hosted solutions offering benefits of:
- 1998Development and launch of AMMOS multi asset software linking assets together to provide full user history
- 1996Debut of WWW web-based software , at Olympic games, for immediate delivery of images from Atlanta to Worldwide audience via existing FastFoto library
- 1995First news agency installation - NewsTeam International
- 1994World’s first regional newspaper installation at the Shropshire Star after a three month trial period
- 1993First system installation within the national newspaper market with the contract for Mirror Group’s electronic library, linking to the editorial sites at Canary…
- 1986Installation of FastFoto digital image library for finger prints and mug shots as part of Home Office field trial - “ The benefits available through this…
- 1984Installation of Europe’s first mass image storage system on optical disk
From the 2005 site
Picdar
The DAM at the core of Media Mogul makes it incredibly easy for people to find, organise, choose and use content.
Every day, people in all corners of your enterprise are probably investing time and money buying and creating new digital assets ? files which could have an enduring value to your enterprise.
With Picdar’s Media Mogul, these digital assets can be used not just once or twice and then forgotten, but put to good use by others afterwards.
Today, leading enterprises in all sectors entrust over fifty million digital assets to our leading edge digital asset management and workflow solutions. As digital platforms continue to evolve across different industries, entertainment services have also embraced mobile-first experiences, with Betum offering a mobile live casino featuring live roulette, blackjack, and baccarat that can be accessed directly from a smartphone.
Magazines
Newspapers
Picture agencies
Generating revenue
Marketing
Our customers reap the rewards by publishing content sooner and with less effort.
This translates to higher revenues and lower costs for content-rich operations.
NEWS
Latest news from picdar
"Sales of images and licensed copy paid for the system even before we'd finished putting all of our content onto it. The business model is fantastic and with Media Mogul it is now very profitable."
says Susan Voss, Emap Active's assets director
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