Your Fotobroker ‘import reports’ are the best way to keep tabs on how the uploads to your reprint site are going. These reports tell you which photos were successfully imported and which photo were rejected by the online reprint system – and why.

However, depending on how many photos you upload each day, the reports can be a bit long and tough to assess quickly…

But all that is about to change. We are currently rolling out an improved & streamlined report that will be easier to review. We removed a lot of the information that really didn’t affect the main goal of reviewing the important information: the key IPTC fields: source/credit, byline, caption – and success or failure of each image. We also added a success/failure summary at the top so you can know at a glance how things went.

Well, it’s raining in Detroit today, but it beats shoveling snow. To celebrate the arrival of the new season (well, in theory) here are a couple of reminders & some details for specific questions we’ve seen more than once.

1) ‘locked items’ in Gryphon – the How & Why…

Items in Gryphon become ‘locked’ the second they’re opened by a user in the backend. If another users attempts to edit the same item it will show as locked to avoid the possibility of overwriting the original user’s work. When the original user clicks away from the item, normally the lock would be immediately cleared…

Just a few things for Gryphon users this month, mostly in the way of reminders. As this semester begins to wind down and you start thinking about who’ll be doing what next term (we’ve been there ;) we thought it might be a good idea to round up some of the most frequent queries we get, in the hopes it may save you a step as you warm up your summertime crew.

In the meantime, we hope all your senior staffers are staying and that all your new hires are brilliant, yet humble and hardworking. Good luck.

1. When uploading, using ftp is a much better and far faster method (than using your web browser) for almost anything, but especially photos or video. Uploading video via your browser is just not recommended, and with really big files you’re almost certain to run into trouble. Uploading via ftp also allows you to batch import your media right into Gryphon all at once.

Gryphon 3.0 is officially here, bringing new features as well as improved performance and stability. We’re working as fast as we can to get all our existing clients transitioned to the new system. Thanks for your patience — we know you are anxious!

Our first major version upgrade since launching our hosted CMS service, Gryphon 3 offers an entirely redesigned admin user interface (thanks to the tireless efforts of Ryan M). Feature highlights include a new admin dashboard, Google Analytics integration, server-side video encoding, improved comment management… Head to our Gryphon overview page for screenshots of the new UI, and check out the extended feature list for the gory details.

The 2010 holiday season turned out to be a busy one after all, and our plans for making last year’s fotobroker Admin Dashboard upgrade the default (and removing the older Administration structure) had to be pushed back until things slowed down a little, but I’m happy to say that’s now completed – and logged-in fotobroker Admins should now see only the newer “Dashboard” links.

Since both the new and old Admin setups have been running side by side for months, I suspect there aren’t many users who are unfamiliar with the Dashboard, but if you have any questions, please let us know. For those who haven’t used it before, it may be helpful to take a quick look at our fotobroker Dashboard tutorial screencast.

Note: For sites that use custom access levels for limited-admin users, that functionality was left unchanged, so users with access below “level 4” (full admins) will see no differences.

First, two frequently-asked questions…

*Q: *Missing mail? Is something not getting delivered to the right people anymore?

*A: *In every automatically-generated email message that Gryphon sends out, a link is included to allow the recipient to block messages sent from the system. It would look something like this:

First, a word about “HD” Video on the web…

The question of “HD” video seems to be coming up more often lately, and we’re sure that in part it’s because sites like Vimeo and YouTube are now including that as a display option. Since most of you are probably already aware, though, that HD over the web isn’t the same thing as HD television, we’ll leave the bandwidth & pixel density explanations for someone else. In short, “HD” on the web basically just means it’s either physically bigger, higher quality, or both.

Since with Gryphon you’re handling the transcoding yourselves before uploading the videos, you can create them at any quality and using the resolution settings you prefer. We can just alter the layout of your templates to enlarge the default player size.

The new find-by-ID box makes marketing specific images easier than ever.

Recently, the folks at the Daily Emerald (Univ. of Oregon) asked us about creating an extra search box for their Fotobroker site that would allow customers to plug in any known image ID number, so that the paper could advertise availability of specific images and then give customers the fastest possible way to find them.

We’ve had our quicklinks system running for quite a while now, and it’s been great, but it was pointed out to us that remembering a number is just easier than remembering a web address, even a short quicklink.

Yes, we’ve got themes — and you’ve got options. One is to let your creativity run wild. Maybe you want total control over your site’s look and feel, or you already have some mockups in the works. Great. Our custom install option is for you.

On the other hand, maybe you want to deploy a great-looking new site fast and with minimal hassle. You can save both time and money with our basic install option. Our new Theme Gallery showcases our growing list of standard template options. Browse live demo sites and choose which of our robust, grid-based designs best fits your publication’s needs.

All of our themes include some basic customization at no extra charge, so you don’t have to worry about being locked in to a completely inflexible design.

What better way to ring in the new year than to introduce a brand-new, entirely redesigned Fotobroker administrative user interface? The release will officially hit the figurative streets soon, but for now we would like to invite you to take the new system for a test drive on your Fotobroker site. Give us some feedback, and we’ll use it to make improvements before the final release.

Check out the new Fotobroker Features page to learn more about what the new UI has to offer. If you decide you want to give it a try, contact us and we’ll set you up.

Don’t forget: Today the sun sets on the era of Context Craft — we are now Detroit Softworks, through and through. Please direct your support queries to support [at] detroitsoftworks [dot] com. Read more about the name change in this post. Happy 2010.

We’ve been making a big push during the past couple months to expand the scope of our documentation. Now, the fruits or our efforts are available online in our newly-launched Support Center at detroitsoftworks.com/support. There you’ll find instructive screencast videos, downloadable documents, tutorials, and other useful resources. We will be expanding this new section continuously, so be sure to bookmark the page and visit us often.

A few highlights:

• Brand new Fotobroker Admin Guide PDF
• Gryphon tour screencast series
• Tutorials with illustrative screenshots
• Free DSW digital swag!

If you have suggestions for additional resources you would like made available, drop us a line. We’re always in the market for good ideas.

So… you’re curious about how Gryphon works, but maybe you’re not quite ready to contact us about scheduling a demo. No problem: We’ve put together a four-part series of screencast videos to help introduce you to Gryphon’s administrative backend.

We aren’t calling it a “whirlwind tour” for nothing — there’s much more to Gryphon than we had time to cover here. For more information, you can check out our extended list of Gryphon features, or drop us a line and schedule that hands-on demo after all. We would be more than happy to arrange a guided tour for your staff.

Gryphon walkthrough:
Part one – Articles | Part two – Media | Part three – Blogs | Part four – Galleries

Thanks to the efforts of the good people at ReCaptcha.net, we’re now able to stem the tide of abuse/junk coming in via our Fotobroker request and feedback forms.

To quote from ReCaptcha’s website :
“A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots, “ or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.”

If you’ve got any questions, please let us know. About half of our customers have this in place already on their forms – and we’ll add others as the spammers find them. We were reluctant to make this change – as it’s our contention that anything that comes between our us and our customers (and yours) isn’t good, but the volume of garbage was increasing beyond the level of an irritation, so… Thanks ReCaptcha!

These days, the internet is available on a wide range of mobile devices, and if you’re not presenting your content to the tiny-screen crowd, you risk missing out on a sizable chunk of your potential Web traffic.

Detroit Softworks customers need not fear: With our service, you’ll be well prepared to stride boldly into a brave new world of mobile computing. Our Gryphon CMS offers native support for mobile templates, meaning any content on your news site can easily be served to mobile users, reformatted for optimal viewing on the small screen.

Take a look for yourself — visit demo.detroitsoftworks.com on your iPhone or other mobile device.

If you’re a current Fotobroker customer, you probably noticed some changes to the appearance of your sales and revenue report this month. We’ve just finished updating our report styles to present your sales info in a new layout that’s better organized and easier to read than ever.

But there’s no need to wait for the mail — we’re rolling the upgrade in to all our customer sites as well. Watch the "Reports" area of your Fotobroker administrative interface for access to the sleek new styles.

If you’ve taken a look at the front page of The Daily Tar Heel’s site in the past day or so, you might have noticed something a little different going on.

We’ve just completed work on a few new templates that make this sort of "featured images" functionality easy to set up and manage. Both the large "Photo of the Week" and the gallery of thumbnails below are populated by searching the database of images for a specific piece of metadata info. Any piece, really — keyword, credit line, location, category …

One of the more common usages would be to assign a unique IPTC keyword to images you’d like to appear on the page. Do that right in Photoshop or your favorite piece of image management software (or in Fotobroker’s administration area) and the template is updated automatically as soon as the new images are imported. That means your "featured images" can be rotated out as often as every day.

We’ve been asked several times recently about making links that can find images with captions that contain a specific word (Today’s Word is “Obama” ;)

This functionality is built into Fotobroker – and you can just tack on “&op_caption=contains&caption=obama” to an existing news photo link. If your site has a “Latest Photos” link, you can use that. You can do the same thing with Page Reprint links too, if you offer PDF reprints.

For a real world example, here’s the North Carolina State University’s Student Media take on it : The Technician’s collection of Barack Obama photos.

A quick way to send a short URL link to a specific image:

When a customer sends in a request for a photo, you’ll want to send them back a link to the file they’re looking for. There are several ways to do just that – but the best way, the way that yields the shortest possible URL – is the short URL alias that Fotobroker provides – called a “quicklink.”

To use them, all you need is the UID of the photo in question. The UID (or Unique Identifier #) is displayed in several places. You can check your photo details page (it’s also always in the Admin’s display). Feel free to call for site specific help. Once you have that number, (in our example here, I’ll use “001”) – just type your URL “reprints.mydomain.com” add “/sp/” and then the specific number.

If you’re a manager or a photo editor struggling to get a photo staff (especially a collegiate staff) to maintain a consistent approach to the metadata and upload tasks for your Fotobroker site, we have some advice for you.

• Make it Official – As consistent usage of your Fotobroker site yields both an excellent online archive and a revenue stream, we can say with confidence that it’s worth the time to do it. We’ve seen some papers get better compliance simply by writing the upload and archive process into the job description as a mandatory part of the responsibility. For college papers struggling with this, it’s worth noting that your photographers will likely be expected to archive (and probably upload for resale as well) once they get to a “real-world” newspaper staff.
• Set an example – Visible administration support for the site can go a long way… If you’re running a vigorous and consistent program of promoting your site, it’s harder for your staffers to “forget” about uploading and archiving tasks. A strong presence for the site internally (framed sample prints in your front office, for example, or coffee mugs for the receptionists) can make a big difference – for both “staffer awareness” and your sales.

If you’re new to the whole idea of selling reprints online with a Fotobroker setup, here’s an explanation of some your options when setting up a new site. It’s a question we’ve been asked a lot lately, as many sites move away from the full-integration of look and feel that has characterized our customers” sites in years past.

I wrote this explanation for a collegiate customer, but it applies generally to the industry and is especially true for small – or chronically understaffed – newspapers.

Here’s a little bit more information about the basic types of Fotobroker sites that we see most often. The titles are a little misleading, as even our most basic install is visually tied to your existing site.