Features addition to Picturepark solution.

Picturepark is a enterprise solution for managing, distributing and integrating media files. URL for the solution is http://www.picturepark.ch/promotion/english/index.cfm

Media Assets - Supports the management of images for images of all popular formats. Image types of JPG, TIF, EPS, BMP, GIF and others are all supported.

Provides features like - Searching with multiple parameters on the media assets, picture manipulation on the server, grouping function for the media assets etc.

The product is developed using Macromedia Coldfusion MX application server.

The following modules were developed for the picturepark product.

PPIS - Picture Park Imaging Service is a scalable service deployed on the Picturepark ASP model infrastructure. This service is deployed on multiple nodes (cluster) and due to the resource requirements needed for the image processing, the requests can be executed in parallel on multiple servers.

XMP Editor -XMP is a specific type of extensible markup language used photo editing applications. XMP Editor was developed that can store information in multiple schema formats of Photoshop, PagedText, MediaManagement, RightsManagement, DublinCore and IPTCCore.

User Interface - Picturepark is deployed on Windows 2003 servers/LINUX servers. The web server stack can be either IIS 6.0/Tomcat.

ImageMagick open source software is deployed as the primary Image processing module for providing image manipulation functionality.

Database - MYSQL version 5.0 on the Windows 2003 server hosts the data related to the application.

ColdFusion is used for the development of the XMP related pages for editing of the XMP schemas.

Scalability of the PPIS. Load balancing of the requests was configured by adding a plug-in at the web server. Weighted round-robin algorithm was configured to balance the requests based on the computing power of the servers. This provides both load balancing and fail over capabilities to the Picturepark Imaging service.

XMP metadata is descriptive "data about data". IPTC and XMP are two standards for direct storing of metadata in pictures. Each of the picture files contains, in addition to the picture itself, this meta information by which Copyright information, data regarding place and time of the shooting / creation or a description can be delivered always directly with the picture file itself. The management of pictures thus acquires a valuable consistency.

PPIS (Picturepark Imaging Service) deployed on a cluster provides a dedicated image rendering service which is robust, scalable and fault tolerant.