The Photo Department Revisited

The Good

I did not realize part of the Photo department’s problem was multiple versions of the same photo. All I saw half a million photos listed on a single server, with a count close to 750,000 photos in total on all the servers. It didn’t occur to me that the most basic file management solution was not used. So what’s the good news? With the new hardware and software, it taught the ladies in the Photo department to think differently about how they organize and manage their photos. Since they knew it would only be a short amount of time before they would max out their new computer and software capabilities, they looked at their work and asked themselves, How can we make the best use of our new stuff? How can we make it last?

Their first answer was learning to let go of the old and outdated photos. The breeders shouldn’t be allowed to use photos (of a cow) that are six years out of date anyway. It throws the idea of ethics and honest representation out the window! After they quashed the outdated photos, they moved on to keeping only a single, working copy of an animal. Yes, there was only the most recent picture of that cow, but in the past it came in six different flavors: a black and white version, a color version, the original version that was sent to them, the new version with the ugly fence PhotoShopped out of the background…you get the idea. Now they hold only the final version.

The results? 500,000 animal photos have been condensed to a slimming 57,700 and counting. (They are still in the process of adding the new animals from this past breeding season).

The Bad

If they had given up storing outdated photos long ago, they would not have needed a dedicated search machine. Now they have a very expensive dedicated search machine that sits and gathers dust, because the finder window works just fine (again). I wish I could have caught the larger problem in the first place, but I wonder how much good that would have done. (And I am not sure the Photo Manager would have gracefully accepted the idea that a peon was pointing out a flaw in their work.)

The Ugly

If our company leaders were tuned in to their employees needs, this problem would not have happened at all. At the risk of sounding like the insubordinate brat that I am, upper management deserved the extra cost for the dedicated search machine simply because they were not paying attention to their duties. Had they been aware of the photo department’s issues in the first place, they could have found alternate and less costly solutions. Really, though, I think it turned out for the best. The heavy price tag was an excellent catalyst to motivate the photo department into thinking forward.