Media Management

A mobile app that helps photographers use their phones to pull the pics directly from the camera, connect to the portal, and send the images directly.

Android

Client

Dinamalar

Platform

Android

Industry

Media

Technology

Android

70%

Faster Sync Engine

80%

Faster File Transfer Speeds

On-The-Go

Photo Management

90%

Improved User Interface

About

Dinamalar is the third-largest Tamil daily newspaper by circulation (Over 900,000), printed from across 10 cities. With over 100 photographers spread across the country, they had a robust capability to supplement news with images. To sustain their competitive edge in a cut-throat market, they created an exclusive, secure portal for photographers to upload their images. But, in the age of the mobile and ‘breaking news,’ it was not

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From Me too to Me First

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Business Challenges

The entire process of photographers connecting the camera to a computer, downloading images, log in to the Dinamalar portal, uploading the images; and then the editing team picking up the images, polishing them, and publishing was taking good 45 minutes. Just too slow in the age of instant news. The client wanted to partner with a leading mobile app development company and contact us based on our proven track record. After our mobile app developers’ brainstorming session with Dinamalar, we came up with a simple solution – a media management mobile app that helps photographers use their phones to pull the pictures directly from the camera, connect to the portal, and send the images directly. Sounded simple and cool. In practice it was complex enough to test our technical competence to the hilt.

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Solution

Mobile phones deal with photos of much smaller sizes compared to DSLR cameras. How to compress the photos as you would sync from the camera to phone without losing clarity? How to convert the raw files into the print-ready format, quickly? How can the app run in the background while images are being uploaded without affecting the performance of other apps? These were just some of the challenges we faced. We literally took a deep dive into technology to solve the puzzle. We sourced libraries for cameras and libraries for image conversion. We built the SDK for the camera’s integration with the mobile. We rode on Amazon S3 for cloud storage. Then all the three strands were stitched together to perfection with native Android app as its drape. After 1,000 person-hours of development and testing spread over 3 months, it was launched to a group of photographers across several cities.

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