Image management solutions

Hello all, as tech artists one of the things our artists like to do is make images. And they like to make a butt load of images. This is their job. Our job is to make sense of it all and make it easy for them to share these images with the team or company.

What solutions have you guys come up with to manage all this? What were the wins or fails with these systems?

We have a guy who wrote a tool that the artists can use to assemble their images into a simple HTML page. Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but it helped us out a lot for that sort of thing.

The artists can save them locally and when their ready to put them together they run the app and it uploads them to server and places them accordingly.

They can give it a title, arrange them in different ways using simple tables, give them captions, etc.

Cons being it’s not editable afterwards by the artists unless they know HTML, and it’s a bit specific for our needs…but the pros were great for us as they click just a few buttons and don’t have to worry about it anymore.

We’ve got a small team here, but what we’ve been doing is basically use Adobe Bridge, and with its own tagging system things have been ok.

In another studio I’ve worked, we used to go and manually make galleries on wiki. It was very slow and boring, and the result wasn’t ah, 100% what we wanted.

[QUOTE=JayG;5329]We have a guy who wrote a tool that the artists can use to assemble their images into a simple HTML page. Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but it helped us out a lot for that sort of thing.[/QUOTE]

That sounds cool and simple. I might try something like that out when I have to do stuff like that.

For general browsing we use XnView. Used to use ACDSee, but our IT guys decided it was getting too bloaty or something.

For management, we’re in the process of moving the first team to an in-house “resource browser” that integrates with Perforce. It uses Perforce attributes and a custom database to let users add metadata to files and do fast searches on them. For instance, texture resources have attributes for width & height, bit-depth, compression mode, spec/normal map flags, etc. All assets can be organized into keyword-like categories that are owned by each project, without changing their on-disk/depot location.