U.K. technology company Capture will debut its image pre-flight utility Greenlight to the U.S. market at this weekend’s Picture Archive Council of America Symposium in Chicago. The first version of Greenlight has been designed primarily to enable agencies to quickly analyze image files and generate a report of common errors, such as wrong file format, images that are too large or small, unwanted compression modes, missing or incorrect embedded color profiles, wrong resolution and extraneous active or inactive layers or channels.
The agency can then correct each problem file or forward the report to the photographer for remedial action. When asked about competing software, Greenlight developer Doug Dawirs said, “While programs like Portfolio can be used to accomplish some of the same tasks, they are not as comprehensive and must be launched and a catalog created. With Greenlight, you can go through 1,000 images and have a complete report sitting on your desktop in the time it takes to just launch Portfolio.”
Recognizing that the best place to detect and correct problems is at the point of origin, one of the goals in creating this pre-flight tool was to enable photographers to check their images against all the technical requirements of their agency and correct problems before submitting images. To that end, when an agency purchases Greenlight, it may freely distribute the tool to all its contributors.
Some photographers say this is just another example of agencies dumping more work on their shoulders. However, if there is a simple and easy way for photographers to be reminded of their agency’s current requirements, it seems likely that they could make simple pre-submission adjustments and get images to market faster, rather than allowing them to get sidelined in the agency’s production queue.
As the agency’s requirements are modified, the auto update feature of the utility makes it easy to notify photographers of such changes. The agency simply adjusts the software and the next time photographers open Greenlight, their version of the software are automatically updated with the latest agency changes over the Internet.
The cross-platform desktop application should save both photographers and their agencies time and money. Greenlight is free for Capture users; others can purchase the software at $999.