[Case study] How can you manage and distribute your media content using a single, adaptable tool?

Digital images and video have revolutionised the way communications and marketing work. Retail, brands, services and culture have gradually shifted their communications to digital. Volumes are constantly increasing and uses are multiplying. Design circuits, sharing between departments and multi-channel distribution are becoming long, complex and inefficient.

To remedy this, Digital Asset Management software like the Ephoto Dam solution is essential. The management of your digital assets will be made easier, thanks to an adaptable platform that is common to the whole organisation.

The Établissement Public du Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie has chosen Ephoto Dam to manage its digital collection of works of art and images of life at the museum.

Find out more about Ephoto Dam and their success story.

An example of successful integration with EPMOO

EPMOO, l'Établissement Public du Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie, is a multi-site institution comprising :

• the Musée d'Orsay, located in the building of the former Orsay railway station,
• the Musée de l'Orangerie, on the other side of the Seine, in the Tuileries Gardens.

With over 3 million visitors a year, the Musée d'Orsay is France's third-largest museum and is world-famous. These museums exhibit a wide range of Western art from the ^19th to the ^20th century, in all its forms: architecture, sculpture, photography and painting.

The colossal amount of digital media accumulated over the years (several hundred thousand photos) and the overhaul of the two museums' websites made it necessary to set up a centralised management tool for the media produced, distributed and used by the institution.

The request from the Musée d'Orsay and the Orangerie

The EPMOO had a number of requirements and wanted a comprehensive digital asset management solution that would enable it to :

• manage media intended to be searched internally and externally;
• enable media to be distributed and shared
• control repositories by centralising access to media;
• manage media exploitation and representation rights;
• feed the school's future websites;
• interface with third-party application solutions;
• be compatible with all types of media and as many formats as possible;
• be accessible to more than 150 users simultaneously.

To sum up, the Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie wanted to equip itself with a platform for managing its digital assets, with detailed management of access rights and a powerful workflow tool. The project was expected to save time and improve team efficiency.

DAM: the solution for managing digital assets

Since they were using open-source software that did not meet their expectations and was no longer in use, the acquisition of Digital Asset Management software was an obvious way of meeting all their expectations.

Choosing the Ephoto Dam solution

EPMOO selected Ephoto Dam, a DAM specialist for over 15 years, for its adaptability to the customer's needs.

"Ephoto Dam was able to adapt to our needs and interface with our third-party applications," explains Nicolas Andry, Project Manager at the Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie.

We chose this solution because it offered all the functionality we were looking for:

✅ The Drupal and Wordpress plugins make it easy to populate the museums' new websites.

✅ A complete API for interfacing the in-house artwork management system with Ephoto Dam to automate the indexing of works.

✅ A SaaS infrastructure hosted in France and spread over 3 data centres. Einden is fully autonomous in its server management, guaranteeing 24/7 access, a 99.9% SLA and scalable updates.

✅ Management of access, download and modification rights, enabling each user to be assigned a role and a level of permissions.

✅ Powerful algorithms for image and shape recognition and duplicate detection.

New challenges for Ephoto Dam

This major project required Ephoto Dam to develop functions to meet the specific needs of the Musée d'Orsay and the Orangerie. New challenges had to be met:

• Customising the deduplication algorithm for the works,
• Customising the Drupal plugin,
• Cropping each work to integrate them into the website,
• Synchronising the solution with the in-house artwork management system,
• Development of a layout module to organise the order of photos of works,
• Development of an author repository for works of art.

Teamwork

After ten or so preparatory workshops with end-users, our iconographers worked with EPMOO to re-index more than 110000 items of media , so that we could make the most of our holdings with complete peace of mind, and set up a common thesaurus to make it easier for users to find what they were looking for. Tailor-made training courses have also been set up to train all users in the software.

Ephoto Dam x Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie: the benefits

For the EPMOO, using Ephoto Dam saves a considerable amount of time. Thanks to this collaborative tool, it is easier for them to search for, share and distribute media. As a result, communication between the various departments is more efficient.

We spoke to Nicolas Andry, Project Manager at the Musée d'Orsay, where he describes his objectives for managing the museum's digital assets, his collaboration with the Einden team and his feedback on the solution.

All the images on the Musée d'Orsay website are now validated and distributed via Ephoto Dam, with guaranteed high availability.

A story that's just beginning

This project with EPMOO has enabled Ephoto Dam to develop further and introduce new functionalities. Today, the Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie and Ephoto Dam are still working together to deploy new functions within the software, such as IIIF support, which is important for art history researchers, and improvements to the layout system.