Picdar s E-Loader, which automatically handles pictures arriving by email, is fast becoming an essential tool for picture desks across the UK. Version 2.0 launches at Newstec 2003

Picdar, the number one choice for digital asset solutions among the UK s national newspapers, announce at Newstec 2003 that as email is now firmly classed as a mission critical picture feed for newspapers it will launch version 2.0 of its E-Loader product. The move towards email by freelancers and picture agencies is causing many newspapers significant problems in how they manage the growing volume of incoming pictures. The shift to e-mail presents a massive drain on time to physically handle pictures and creates systems issues where some email servers are simply unable to cope with the load.

Andy Heather, CTO at Picdar says, Our E-Loader product is proven to be a vital tool for picture editors to automatically manage email picture feeds. We continue to refine E-Loader and are pleased to announce the release of Version 2.0 at Newstec 2003. In such a competitive market, the faster a picture editor can respond to a good image the quicker they can take advantage. Allan Marshall, Managing Director of Associated Mediabase, the IT division of Associated Newspapers, said, We pride ourselves on getting some of the best pictures to press before anyone else. We use the best technology to help us manage the massive volume of images coming to us by email. For us to maintain our leadership position we use E-Loader.

E-loader is designed to scan incoming emails for images and automatically save them within Picdar s integrated workflow management system from which editors can immediately search and retrieve the most relevant or up to date image available. The latest release has extended support for Postscript file formats, automatic failover between data base hosts and automated failover between alternate mail servers in addition to its ability to handle an even wider range of file formats.

Emailed images handled manually take about two minutes each to upload and sort out. For example, the Daily Sport which has upwards of 400 images arriving daily via email says the time wasted handling them soon mounts up to whole man years. Mike Sharp, Picture Editor at The Sunday Mirror commented, It s a great addition to the system, saves a huge amount of time. Technical Director of Sport Newspapers, Andrew Fickling said, The growth in volume of our digital assets was making search and retrieval increasingly difficult, and I am confident that Picdar s solutions will address these issues. At the Scottish Daily Record, Deputy Picture Editor Alasdair Baird said, E-loader is an invaluable tool for the picture desk as the trend away from ISDN to Internet delivery is constantly growing."

With E-loader, picture desk staff no longer have to waste valuable hours individually opening hundreds of emailed images and saving them to the system. Picdar s E-loader will automatically scan all incoming Post Office Protocol (POP-3) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP-4) mail servers for images and store them within the easy-search database.

Available as a standalone product or as an integrated part of Picdar s Media Mogul software, E-Loader is fast becoming a vital tool on picture desks across the UK. Based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), E-loader is fully Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) compliant and supports encoding systems such as, Base64, uuencode and BinHex.