SNS Group, the leading Scottish picture agency supplying national newspapers with sporting and corporate images, is the first picture agency in the UK to use a true Digital Asset Management system built on the Mac OS X server platform. Developed by Picdar, its Media Mogul Agency Edition running on Mac OS X Server means that a much wider market can now benefit from Picdar's world class DAM systems.

The Mac OS X server release of Picdar's Media Mogul is excellent news for picture agencies and magazine work-groups where Apple is the dominant platform for both servers and desktops, said Andy Heather, CTO at Picdar.

SNS needed a digital asset management and picture desk system that would handle its library of over 70,000 digital images (assets). Set to grow at potentially 50,000 assets per year, the company needed a fully scaleable solution that would meet the needs of its in-house picture desk and external customers for speed and delivery.

The solution Picdar has provided for SNS brings together the best innovations of web technology, high volume image management and Picdar's asset management hosting. Picdar harnessed SNS' existing in-house OSX Server and XServerRAID storage, combining it with Picdar's virtual URL technology. This gives SNS the speed of asset management and storage while keeping hi-resolution images in-house, with high-speed publishing and transaction management using low-resolution images published over the web and hosted by Picdar. This combination means that SNS can control individual rights management, billing, and image ingestion while giving their customers the speed of seeing and downloading images direct from the web.

The whole system uses a drag-and-drop interface making image management for SNS simple and fast to learn, and making buying images for its customers quick and intuitive.

Said John Morrison, IT Manager at SNS, Picdar's approach to systems architecture will radically improve the way we do business. SNS Group is highly ambitious and now that we can use Picdar's systems on the Mac OS X Server platform, it will make our business easier to manage, and provide significantly better usability for our customers.