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

Digital images and video have revolutionized the way communications and marketing work. Businesses, brands, services and culture have gradually shifted their communications to digital. Volumes are constantly increasing and uses are multiplying. Design circuits, inter-departmental sharing 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 facilitated, thanks to an adaptable platform common to the whole organization.

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.

Discover Ephoto Dam through the EPMOO adventure and 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 establishment 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 Jardin des Tuileries.

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

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

The Musée d'Orsay and the Orangerie's request

The Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie had a number of requirements, and wanted a comprehensive digital asset management solution that would enable it to :

• manage media to be searched internally and externally;
• enable the distribution and sharing of media
• control repositories by centralizing access to media;
• manage media exploitation and representation rights;
• provide content for future corporate 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.

In short, the Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie wanted a platform for managing its digital assets, with fine-tuned management of access rights and a powerful workflow tool. The project was expected to save time and improve team efficiency.

DAM: the solution for digital asset management

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

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 functionalities we were looking for:

✅ Drupal and Wordpress plugins make it easy to populate new museum websites.

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

✅ A SaaS infrastructure hosted in France and spread over 3 datacenters. Fully autonomous in server management, Einden guarantees 24/7 access, 99.9% SLA and scalable updates.

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

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

New challenges for Ephoto Dam

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

• Customize the deduplication algorithm for works of art,
• Customization of the Drupal Plugin,
• Crop each work for integration into the website,
• Synchronize the solution with the internal artwork management system,
• Development of a layout module to organize the order of artwork photos,
• Development of an author repository for works of art.

A team effort

After a dozen preparatory workshops with end-users, our iconographers worked with EPMOO to re-index more than 110000 media so as to be able to make the most of their holdings, and to set up a common thesaurus to facilitate user searches. Tailor-made training courses have also been set up for all users of the software.

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

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

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

All 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, important for art history researchers, and improvements to the layout system.