March, 2007
Success Story N°1: Paris City Hall
We met the Paris City Hall (Photo Department) staff and talked about Phraseanet IV. If you speak French, click HERE to read the Success Story in pdf.
You will also find a summary below:
Paris City Hall’s choice: Phraseanet IV
The City Hall has been using our software since 1999. The Photo Department needed a corporate solution which was a tool to help manage and publish all the pictures, such as views and sights of Paris, events taking place in the capital city, or pictures regarding the mayor’s visits in the neighborhoods of Paris.
About the Municipality of Paris
For centuries, Paris has fascinated people by its rich culture, diversity and history.
The municipality, like the city itself, is different from others: one city hall, but there are also twenty district town halls. It is only recently that the city is directed by a mayor (since 1977): Jacques Chirac, Jean Tibéri and Bertrand Delanoë.
Paris, with its many famous sights, great museums, many parks, offers a rich cultural life. They often say a picture is worthy a hundred words. To manage this exceptional fund of pictures, Phraseanet was the answer to the City Hall’s needs.
Choosing the solution
Eight years ago, the City Hall of Paris chose Phraséa to become its picture management software.
In 2005, the Photo Department migrated towards the new “Phraseanet IV”, which is the fourth range of applications of the brand. The software offers a bunch of major assets:
Phraseanet IV is a full web solution. No specific installation is required on the users’ computers. All they need to access the database is a common web browser.
Built on standard technologies (MySQL, PHP, XML), Phraseanet IV runs under Windows, MacOSX & Linux as well.
From a web browser, the user can get an access to all Phraseanet IV applications: “Production”, “Client”, “Administration”, “Report”, and the brand new one, “Thesaurus” (coming with the Phraseanet IV 2.1 release).
The solution uses the “Drag & Drop” technology, which is very convenient for people who daily work on pictures.
The Photo Library Missions
The main missions consist in:
Gathering all the pictures of the city in one database so that the authorized personnel get a quick access to the pictures:
To that end, Phraseanet IV has a powerful search engine with many ways to make a search on a picture (Queries made using natural language, with Boolean operators, substitution characters, troncatures, etc).
They also need to publish images quickly and safely. Like many of our customers, the City Hall requires a high level of security and confidentiality, that’s why Phraseanet gives them the appropriate solutions to keep their data safe.
The software provides the Photo Department with a way of backing up the pictures that are part of France’s culture and history. It is very important to the city of Paris to possess such a tool of conservation and valuation of its pictures.
A mission of information: The publication of pictures in the media to promote the city and announce the big events taking place in the capital.
It answers to their needs in matter of internal communication.
From a general point of view, all this contributes to the modernization of the whole infrastructure and gives a look of a modern and living city.
Specific use of the software
Inside the Photo Department, photographers and art editors are using Phraseanet IV.
The pictures are taken by Henri Garat’s team of photographers. The art editors, Sylvie Vermeulen and Nathalie Dubois, use Phraseanet IV daily: Indeed, they are in charge of indexing the pictures, but also of their publication.
They need to manage over 100.000 pictures, divided into two specific kinds of documents: the official pictures of the mayor; and illustration pictures.
Both are composed by a lot of collections. Actually, their number is unlimited.
Phraseanet IV is a solution which allows them indexing the fields very quickly (of one document or of a batch of pictures).
The art editors receive a lot of requests asking for pictures of Paris. They need to be able to answer to these requests as fast as possible. To that end, they are in need of a powerful search engine.
These pictures are for the press (non commercial use only) or for an internal use to the municipal agents (ex: Department of the Education, district halls personnel).
The district halls of the city often need a few pictures to publish in their local magazines. About 50 municipal agents have now an access to view the city images. The solution has a useful interface (“Phraseanet IV Administration”) which helps the Photo Department manage these rights.
What about tomorrow?
Phraseanet IV adapts to its customers’ requests. New functionalities have been asked for; some of them will appear in the new 2.1 release.
“We are using Phraseanet IV all day. This photo management system is user-friendly, efficient, evolving with the new technologies. The new release corresponds to a lot of new functionalities we’ve been waiting for”...
Sylvie Vermeulen, DGIC, Photo Department, Paris City Hall
