Better Image Search for Large-Scale Publishers

James Fritz

Press release
Imprezzeo, the visual search software company, and WoodWing Software, developer of cross-media publishing systems, have announced a technology partnership to enable publishers to save time and money searching and using images.
Imprezzeo’s visual search technology has been integrated with WoodWing’s Content Station, a next-generation multichannel publishing tool for content producers. This new integration allows users of WoodWing’s Enterprise publishing system to search for images using other images as examples, rather than having to rely on metadata alone to find what they want, thereby achieving more relevant results in less time. The software acts as a “more like this” feature for visual content and bases search results on content similarity, not text descriptions.
Imprezzeo Image Search provides a range of Web Services to enable easy integration with Workflow and Search systems, as well as a Configuration Utility to optimize performance. This allows for a quick integration with Content Station, WoodWing’s application for the editorial team to plan, create, manage and publish content for offline and online channels. The new integration with Imprezzeo was first showcased at IFRA 2009 in Vienna, as part of the announcement of the new Enterprise 7 and its Search 2.0 capabilities. The IFRA show is the leading event for the newspaper industry.
“We are delighted to have agreed this partnership as it means Imprezzeo Image Search can now be made available to WoodWing’s extensive, global client base,” said Dermot Corrigan, Imprezzeo’s chief executive officer. “Our experience is that while publishers often have very rich repositories of image content, they are not easy to search as the content is poorly keyworded, if keyworded at all. Imprezzeo retrieves results based on content similarity and not metadata. By utilizing that we solve this problem so that publishers can now locate content that they otherwise couldn’t find, reduce their spend on external sources and save time in the process”.
“Our new Search 2.0 received high praise from IFRA visitors stopping by our booth, clearly showing the need to tackle this problem,” said Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software. “It’s easy to overlook the time spent on searching, when analyzing the productivity of an editorial team, but this can be considerable. Our solutions aim at raising the overall efficiency, while making the editor’s job easier and allowing for more creativity. Having Imprezzeo’s technology available for our customers is a great addition to our system.”