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SCMP Reporter

A VAST library of photographs will soon be replaced by a slick, electronic archive operating for the first time in the world at the South China Morning Post.

  The AP Preserver system, developed by United States' media giant Associated Press, will link the SCMP's two production houses - at Dorset House in Quarry Bay and the Morning Post Centre in Tai Po - and the news photography world to a single, advanced computer system.

  The SCMP's move to split-plant production in July created the need to transfer photo images from one location to another.

  Maintaining identical photo libraries in each place was not feasible but a computer system designed to store and move material quickly, cost-effectively and with maintained and even improved quality was available.

  The AP Preserver features a digital database, which enables immediate storage of photographs from both foreign news services and SCMP staff photographers and with access from both the Post's Dorset House offices and the Morning Post Centre in Tai Po.

  The US$1.2-million system dispenses with the usual time-consuming and complicated processing and production methods used by a paper's photographers, editors and printers, and eliminates the risks previously associated with hard-drive mass-storage systems.

  System technician and picture researcher Chris Walton said the AP Preserver was virtually fail-safe, with hard disk technology that featured a 'built-in redundancy' or 'crash-proof' storage system.

  Walton said the AP Preserver used software that was technically in pre-release, so it was undergoing final alterations before its targeted November launch.

  He said the integrated computer archive was tailored to service the SCMP's photographic and production needs and provide an electronic library which was easily and quickly accessed.

  'I think what we're doing is unique. Most papers in the world use one system to move pictures from the photo department to production and a separate system to archive pictures. We're using one system for everything,' Walton said.

  'This gives us two advantages. First, live pictures - those which have just come in - are available to editors. And you can find the pictures easily instead of having to go over a bunch of files.

  'Second, in most newspapers, if you want to get in and look at the live pictures, you have to know how to use a host of equipment. Journalists need to be technology experts just to do their jobs.

  'Here, one piece of software is all you have to use and it's a relatively easy program. With the developments AP is planning, it will become easier to use. And, we hope, to make photographic prints obsolete as it takes a lot of space to store them.'   Based on the AP Picture Desk system, the AP Preserver uses a Leaf Desk or digital darkroom. Connected to this digital darkroom are feeds from the various news services, including Associated Press, Reuter, Xinhua (the New China News Agency) and Agence France Presse.

  Feeds come in via telephone lines or satellite and can be seen as they land in the darkroom. There, pictures are decoded and sent to four connected computers, in the finance, sport, features and computer sections of the newspaper and on the foreign desk.

  Every picture, on arriving in the darkroom, goes automatically into the computer archive. The archive is based on the AP Leaf Desk but is far more sophisticated in terms of what it can search and the number of pictures it can hold.

  SCMP photographers, using computers, will scan their photographs into the archive alongside those from the various news services. Then all sections of the newspaper and Tai Po production have access to all staff pictures, as well as the live pictures. Eventually, all the pictures in the library will be available.

  Editors in various sections prepare copies of photos rather than actual prints for production so the quality of the original is never altered.

  'We hope to have photographers shooting a picture and putting it directly into the archives within 30 minutes of getting back to the office,' Walton said.

  'Then it's in the system and an editor can pull up that photograph at his computer, size it and send it to production.'   The AP Preserver operates from a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) box, which houses five identical hard drives rather than the usual one.

  Data is split and written simultaneously across the five drives, boosting the speed at which the system receives input. Each drive receives 25 per cent of a particular file, rather than 20 per cent, creating an overlap.

  The result is that, when one drive fails, it can be replaced immediately with another drive and none of the stored data is lost.

  'The RAID box is unbreakable. Hard drives crash, it's just a question of time. They wear out or just get dusty and that will cause a system to crash,' Walton said.

  'When you have a $1.2-million system with thousands of photographs on it, the last thing you need is a little $2,000 hard drive broken and a lost archive.

    'We don't have to worry about that now because, if the hard drive crashes, we just pull it out, put a new one in and it automatically recovers all the data lost in the crash.'   Walton said the AP Preserver would improve the quality of photographs printed in the Post's publications.

  'Photography will benefit greatly. Using the computers, they can make pictures better and, more importantly, salvage pictures when there's been bad light or something wrong with the lens,' he said.

  'Editors will benefit when trying to find a photo to fit a story. The archive automatically searches across all fields of a specific subject. For example, in a search for a photo of Governor Chris Patten, the archive will tell you information about prospective photos such as whether it is horizontal or vertical, if he's facing left or right and what mood he's portraying - whether he's serious or disinterested.'   Walton said his task of scanning existing library prints into the archive was huge.

  'There's a vast number of photographs stored and a lot of it's junk,' he said.

  'The policy once was that you stored every picture . . . [but] I don't think we're ever going to re-scan the entire archive.' 



Digital photo archive a first