Article Summary
- NOOR produces and licenses thousands of images every year to a range of media companies, startups, institutions, and non-profits.
- Picter has helped them significantly streamline their pitching, selection and delivery workflow, involving hundreds of prospective photo editor clients the world over.
- When did NOOR see the big picture? When using Picter Workspace was able to save them up to 30 minutes on a single series of client interactions pitching the photojournalist Kadir Van Lohuizen.
- NOOR calculates that using Picter Workspace will help them to save a significant amount of administrative time handling images every day.
- NOOR uses Picter Workspace to manage its relationships with an international network of over 1000 publications and media companies on behalf of its member photographers.
Launched in 2007, NOOR is a multicultural collective of highly accomplished journalists, authors, photographers, artists, and filmmakers bearing witness to the world. Similar to many boutique talent representation agencies, the independent NOOR collective faces a common set of challenges: the need to protect the IP of their creators, multiple stakeholders who should have varying degrees of access, and an industry that is filled with idiosyncratic workarounds for image-based workflows.
Before Picter Workspace.
A team member at NOOR spends their days acting as the connector between various stakeholders in the world of international photo journalism. On the one hand are the NOOR talents – photographers like Kadir Van Lohuizen, Tanya Habjouqa and Stanley Greene – on the other hand, NOOR’s extensive range of international organizations, publications, and institutions, such as Fondation Carmignac, Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.
NOOR staff members seek opportunities to expose both the ever-evolving portfolios of their active authors for commissions and assignments, as well as license work in their extensive archive.
NOOR’s Digital Director Pierre Mohamed-Petit gave us a behind the scenes look at how Picter Workspace is being used to accelerate both their in-house processes and their client-facing operations.
What used to be an awkward dance that utilized emails with attachments, PDF files and screenshots of Adobe Bridge has become an elegant process of tuning communication using the granular permissions, variety of sharing tools, and elegant interface provided by Picter Workspace.
As part of NOOR’s daily workflow, the agencies’ role is to promote the work of its authors by sharing stories with editors. Kadir van Lohuizen’s Rising Tide project has been used as a case study for this work.
With Kadir’s exhibition and television series out in October, NOOR has been sharing the work with editors worldwide. NOOR handpicked a select group of editors. They created a Picter Workspace project simply by dragging and dropping the set of photos into an empty project. Then, using the Presentation Link option with downloads and comments disabled, they had a ready-to-share digital asset they could paste into their email outreach. At this stage in the conversation, the relationship is all about whether the editor likes the work. Pure presentation is all that’s needed.
“Many clients can be reached with just one link using Workspace.”
– Pierre Mohamed-Petit, Digital Director, NOOR Images
“I need to build edits while a photographer is on assignment wherever they are in the world – such as the Amazon, the Arctic, or in Palestine – while delivering to clients in Beijing or London, or Washington.”
– Pierre Mohamed-Petit, Digital Director, NOOR Images
NOOR made Kadir’s work accessible by sharing a project using Picter’s intuitive and straightforward Workspace platform. The editors on the receiving end could go straight to viewing a beautiful presentation of Kadir’s images in just one click, without having to sign up or log in.
Have a look for yourself: workspace.picter.com/v/htnrH7zr
Once editors saw the project and expressed interest, NOOR sent review links for editors to interact with the image. Editors were able to visualize and create their own selections, giving them a visual feedback channel with the NOOR office.
Once selections were approved for use, NOOR simply enabled download access to the relevant projects and the editors were able to access the high resolution files for publication.
By using Picter Workspace for pitching editorial stories, creating, selections, and delivering the final material, NOOR managed to create a more fluid workflow – and save time in the process. Using Picter Workspace has helped NOOR to present, pitch, create selections, and disseminate the work, all in one place.
“We can collaborate on strong edits even in places where there are bandwidth issues. I can send a Workspace project to a photographer in the field where hi res edit would never be possible.”
– Pierre Mohamed-Petit, Digital Director, NOOR Images
NOOR works with 14 member photographers and an archive of over 100,000 images, 100 films, and a network of over 1,000 publications and media organizations. By engaging with contacts in timezones from California to Beijing, NOOR needs material to be available at any time of day. NOOR is truly a 24/7 machine and Picter Workspace powers the connections between the photographers, clients, and the NOOR team.