OpenRoad increased the efficiency of FII’s Image Library 10-fold

Forestry Innovation Investment’s (FII) mandate is to support an environmentally sustainable and prosperous forest economy in British Columbia. One service FII provides is curating a large collection of BC forest industry images that it makes available to BC forest companies, the Province of BC, the media, and the university community. FII allows these stakeholders to browse the collection online and submit requests for permission to use the images. FII asked OpenRoad to improve on its previous Image Library application which was time consuming to manage, restrictive in the way images were categorized, and presented some usability challenges to users.

OpenRoad took a fresh look at the Image Library and found ways to reduce the time required to upload images to the library, add the ability to categorize multiple images at once, and reduce the effort required to produce the resulting contract. End-users benefited from faceted browse style navigation and the addition of a persistent list of the images they want. An improvement in the way the images were watermarked also better enforces the copyright and protects from unauthorized use.

The result: FII experienced a 10-fold decrease in the amount of time required to manage images in the system, and a dramatic improvement in the amount of time spent managing incoming image requests.