Picdar in the news
Read what the press are saying about us
Article reproduced with permission from PrintMedia Management Magazine. From January 2005 Edition
Case study: TUI UK

The largest tourism group in the world, TUI, tasked Picdar with the challenges of: saving money by bringing digital images from the reprographics house to a central in-house store; providing an electronic central repository for over 50,000 images and growing by 7,000 more per year; linking and providing the images together on the website; and integrating the Picdar solution with existing text and brochure production systems.


The solution is an image management system with fast, easy searching, saving time and manpower and delivering greater efficiency. Implementation of the new technology is saving TUI around £700,000 annually and reducing turnaround times by two-thirds.

The images are no longer held at the reprographics house, which charged for storage and delivery, meaning huge cost savings, better control and faster retrieval of assets. And the collection of 2D and 3D images, maps and graphics for brochures and the website is available to the company via an intranet providing high-speed delivery. Use of 'free text' rather than 'key word' searching provides concise, descriptive and flexible searches giving targeted results. This means less time wasted locating images with more time available to focus on value-added tasks.

The solution allows high-speed delivery of the PDF version of the brochure to all Mac and PC users. Each image is linked to the specific page and the brochure. This provides an easy-touse, fully indexed and searchable solution which assists in the finding and the profitable reusing of images. The solution rapidly provides images to match the text on the website, allowing the latest holiday offers to be viewed immediately.

TUI UK development manager in publishing Cate Dixon says: "A new content management system and image database support our in-house PDF workflow for page production, allowing simultaneous publication of content to brochure and the web. A brochure that took 13 weeks to produce can now be output in just four weeks."

Sue Vaughan, also of TUI UK, says: "We can now get to everything at the click of a button. The teams here have never been able to see all of our images at once, let alone be able to find them so easily. It brings significant benefits in terms of workflow, time saving and cost reduction."