FASTFOTO Picture Desk helps the picture editors of newspapers select the best images from the thousands received each day.

With the emphasis on immediacy, FASTFOTO Picture Desk is designed for newspapers and magazines that need direct access to libraries of thousands of images which are received on a daily and hourly basis. 

Whilst it can be used as a stand-alone application, most customers use FASTFOTO Picture Desk in conjunction with AMMOS, which archives published material and pictures which have long-term value.

Newspapers acquire digital images from a all these sources: in-house scanning departments; the newspaper's own library; external agencies via modem, ISDN, e-mail and traditional wire feeds.

FASTFOTO Picture Desk collects images from any source, indexes and loads them into a powerful database and then provides access for authorised users.

The user can search for all available images pertinent to a story and then create a shortlist of images.  New images can be added to the shortlist as they arrive and then a final selection can be made. 

FASTFOTO Picture Desk typically stores images for up to 15 days.  Unless the user decides to archive or park images - which is achieved by a mouse-click - they are automatically discarded thus freeing storage capacity for new images.

The volume of images arriving at the picture editor's desk is increasing by around 25% per year.   Some FASTFOTO picture desks process over 5,000 images every day.  Also, more people are becoming involved in the picture handling process. 

But picture selection is still a specialist process and quality must be maintained. FASTFOTO Picture Desk accommodates these requirements through its Tag & Route facility.

The picture desk can tag pictures for particular editorial desks or for particular stories, through a simple drag and drop procedure. This allows quality and costs to be controlled, while editorial users can select from a small number of relevant pictures, rather than drowning in thousands of irrelevant ones. In much the same way, pictures for one desk or title can be kept hidden from the other departments using the same picture desk.

FASTFOTO Picture Desk runs on UNIX, Linux and NT servers and can be accessed by native PC and Mac client applications or via a standard Web browser.