Premium Edition

Features

Configure your own search fields

Unique to the Premium Edition and above, you can search inside documents, add your own dropdown lists, tree structures (taxonomies), controlled vocabularies and checkboxes. You can organise the data into panels and vary views of this information by user - and remain fully compatible with other graphics software.

Detect and intercept duplicates

To prevent duplicates entering your system, IMS uses a visual check. It automatically intercepts uploads which look like duplicates and asks the user what their choice is: skip the file, merge or overwrite?

The similarity check works even when the files are different sizes, file formats and crops. It's as smart as a human eye at finding the resemblance between existing files, all in a fraction of a second, saving you storage space and tagging time later.

Version control and change logs

In the IMS Premium Edition, you have the ability to make revisions of files and move backwards or forwards through the revisions whenever you wish. This also covers the metadata, so you can easily see exactly what changes (and who made the change) and revert if you need to.

You can annotate files with notes which can be seen by other users, and require a note whenever a file is downloaded. This is just like leaving a sticky note on a file - great for improving visibility of important past uses of the same file.

Upload and download approvals

In a shared library, some files that users upload may need manual approval first. The Premium Edition of IMS lets you send new files through approval workflows, with options to gather metadata from the user and even open a chat window with an administrator to leave extra notes with the upload.

Downloads can also be sent through an approvals workflow first, so that a central team can be certain about how files will be used before releasing them, possibly with extra notes or details attached to help the user.

Share via lightboxes, web links, Twitter, Facebook...

Sending content from your Third Light server does not involve copying the data to your own computer. Instead of posting CDs or attaching huge videos to emails, you can use IMS to send a lightbox that links to the files and a discussion window. It's intuitive to combine the discussion with the delivery of the files, and produces a record that stays in the system for review later.

Pushing content to other channels is also part of the Premium Edition. For social media, you can prepare and post files directly to Twitter or Facebook, or make links to files that are easy to cut and paste into web pages, forums and emails.

Video playback and conversion

Managing video content is a natural fit with IMS, with a fast and efficient video player ready to display previews or full-screen movies. When you upload videos, they are transformed into thumbnails and are quick and easy to browse, search and play inside your browser.

Our video support is designed to avoid using plugins, so it also works on iPads and iPhones, as well as other mobile devices.

Mapping and geo-tagging

Digital cameras are often equipped with GPS receivers, providing location data about photographs captured. Third Light IMS reads the coordinates and provides mapping features, and also automatically turns the coordinates into place names for the search engine. It's a complete photo mapping tool, ready to use.

• Uploading a photograph of the Statue of Liberty will mean that photograph is automatically searchable as "New York"
• You can search within a specified distance of a photograph to find more images from the same area

Prices

The Third Light Premium Edition is affordable and convenient. Options such as more storage or extra modules can be added at any time; simply start with the required components and then add more if you need them.

IMS Premium comes with an initial 100GB storage allocation and unlimited technical support by email.

Required Components

Popular Options

The following options are available to help you expand your Premium Edition site.

Training and Handover

Additional Options

Additional options and services are available in the next edition up (Enterprise).

Case Studies

Mortgages Plc

Mortgages plc is a UK residential mortgage lender and a wholly owned subsidiary of Merrill Lynch, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Founded in 1997, the company has offices in London and Glasgow and a number of regionally based staff.

Mortgages plc uses Third Light Enterprise edition to centrally store and display images for public relations use, including photographs from corporate events and product launches. Using IMS the pictures can be accessed from the London, Glasgow or regional offices of the business, and to share photos with partner companies using the lightbox, IMS's collaboration feature. The service is also used to offer prints from hospitality events to guests.

Peter Beaumont, Sales and Marketing Director, comments:

"Using the Third Light server has given us a way to distribute pictures and keep them centrally managed. We are able to offer galleries after events or launches, which we can share with our guests, PR companies and other relevant contacts. We've got photos from events since 2000, and it's fantastic having that available so easily. We also use IMS to store our stock of marketing images, such as director press photos."

"We've saved time and improved awareness of our brand. Having this picture library generates a positive impression, without being complicated to use. We're delighted to be using this in our marketing team."

Peter Beaumont, Mortgages plc

▼ Read more…

The Scout Association

The Scout Association provides adventurous activities and personal development opportunities for 400,000 young people aged 6-25. Internationally, the Association has over 28 million young people enjoying the benefits of Scouting across 216 countries. In 2007, Scouting celebrated its Centenary with a programme of events and activities in the UK and worldwide. The world came to the UK for the 21st World Scout Jamboree, the highlight of the World Scouting calendar.

"2007 was an important year for Scouting. Not only were we celebrating 100 years of delivering fun and adventure to young people, we were also playing host the 21st World Scout Jamboree. Some 40,000 adults and 100,000 day visitors visited Hylands Park Essex in July and August, making it the largest Scout event in the UK for fifty years. With the eyes of the world on the Movement, it was vital that we had in place a robust Asset Management system to quickly and effectively upload and deliver high quality images to media partners."

"Third Light delivered a flexible, reliable and adaptable system that has transformed the way we use and manage our images, encouraging user generated content and ensuring ease of use both at the admin and user ends. Quite simply, they helped us "be prepared"!

Chris James, Head of Corporate Communications, The Scout Association

Scout Association Case Study

▼ Read more…

Anglia Ruskin University

Anglia Ruskin provide a University education for over 28,000 students at their campuses who are currently studying on one of the main campuses, or at one of the many colleges that form the Regional University Partnership.

Anglia Ruskin University use Third Light's Intelligent Media Server as a central image library. Staff and suppliers across two campuses, in Cambridge and Chelmsford reach the library using the University network. Third Light IMS helps Anglia Ruskin create prospectuses and other marketing materials efficiently as they promote the University and its courses to potential future students.

"IMS saves us hours of searching and sorting through pictures. The system is intuitive to use, works from both of our campuses and gives us excellent control over how images are used. The system is easy to use, very immediate, functional and innovative. The time saved and ease-of- access makes it great value for money."

Rebecca Bowerman, Anglia Ruskin University

Anglia Ruskin Case Study

▼ Read more…

Trinity Hall, Cambridge University

Trinity Hall is the fifth oldest college in the University of Cambridge, founded in the year 1350 and having nearly 10,000 members around the world.

The Development Office at Trinity Hall is responsible for fundraising, publications, organising events, and keeping in touch with alumni. It also acts as a hub within the College, coordinating communications between departments and handling its external relations.

To support all of its aims, the Development Office maintains a stock of high quality imagery for use in print or electronic communications when required. In 2006, Third Light was introduced to help centralise the image library, as the archive was becoming difficult to manage.

Jocelyn Poulton, Development Director of Trinity Hall, explains how Third Light helps manage the college's media:

"Traditionally, we stored files on the College file server, or used prints and transparencies housed in our archives, or obtained CD-ROMs from our photographers, staff and alumni. However, as the age of digital cameras and the internet began, the stock of photographs available to us grew significantly, and we were struggling to keep track of all the new images and associated copyright details."

"We selected the Third Light IMS software as it provided a single system for all our needs - particularly the centralising of our photographic files. We are especially impressed by the ease with which we can now search for images quickly using simple keywords. We are also finding the interface for tracking image usage very helpful. Third Light's excellent team helped us get started; and they are always happy to offer support and advice."

The Trinity Hall image library is hosted by Third Light and is accessed via the high speed network in the College. Commercial storage and hosting, software updates, daily backups and technical support are all included in the Third Light package.

Jocelyn Poulton comments on the importance of the all-in-one service:

"A college of our age has a rich archive, replenished by each generation of students and staff. Recording our history and heritage is vital and the new image library has become a precious resource, allowing us not only to store photographic images, but also maintain a photographic record of our collections. The IMS software is really easy to use, belying the powerful software, reliable storage offered and technical ability of the Third Light team."

"We continue to discover more time-saving benefits of the Third Light system, and surprise ourselves by finding more opportunities to make use of the software."

The college plans to open online galleries for alumni to browse photos and buy prints or gift items online, adding a revenue stream to the service and further expanding the site for the college and its members.

Trinity Hall Case Study

▼ Read more…

Specifications

The Third Light Premium edition is a highly-capable solution, hosted for you on a advanced servers in our data centres.

High Performance, Fully-Private Cloud

We provide you with all of the computing resources needed to give you a fast, reliable service, including all storage, backups, processing and hosting.

• Up to 1,000Mb/s network transfer speeds (upload and download)
• We use high-performance SAS 10K drives in our Storage Area Networks (SAN)
• All our of storage is based on RAID 6 redundancy, with hot spares
• All of your content is backed up twice daily - once on site and once to our second data centre
• We operate from our own facilities - nothing is outsourced
• We don't meter bandwidth, CPU, disk or memory (we only charge for storage)
• We deliberately under-work our VMware hosts to ensure every customer receives a premium service
• We consistently achieve 99.99% uptime, independently monitored

Zero Maintenance

Our software evolves with new features and updates on a regular cycle, resulting in between 3 and 4 updates each year. These updates contain new features, performance enhancements, bug fixes and occasional security patches.

All updates are included free of charge in your annual subscription. For as long as you use your Third Light site, you will never have to worry about patching, upgrading or replacing your software: our simple one-click updates are available for you to apply whenever you choose.

Security As Standard

Third Light's hosted solution is defended from unwanted attention, to keep your site absolutely secure.

• Hardened operating system subjected to penetration testing and continual security scanning
• Inbound packet filtering and content inspection, with Intrusion Detection System (IDS)
• Backups are transferred between our data centres over encrypted connections
• PCI DSS-compliant security features for password protection and password complexity
• Change controlled, logged and audited administrator access via SSH
• Full support for HTTPS encryption of your entire site

Our data centres are also protected for your peace of mind:

• Multi-factor staff authentication using physical ID tags, photo ID and book-ahead
• 24/7 manned security doors at our data centres
• Inert gas fire suppression
• Uninterruptible power supplies and 1 week diesel reserve generators
• CCTV records and remote monitoring of all equipment

Image, Document and Videos Support

Image Formats

GIF (including animated GIFs)
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
PNG (Portable Network Graphic)
BMP (Bitmap Image File)
TIFF (Intel and Motorola, uncompressed, ZIP and LZW)
JPC (JPEG 2000 Code Stream File)
JP2 (JPEG 2000 Core Image File)
EXR (Industrial Light And Magic OpenEXR)
IDD (Adobe InDesign)
WEBP and WEBPLL (Google image format)
TGA (Targa Graphic)
AI (Adobe Illustrator)
PSD (Adobe PhotoShop)
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format)
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
PS (PostScript)

Raw formats

RAW (Leica and others)
CR2 (Canon)
RAF (Fuji)
DCR (Kodak)
MRW (Motorola)
NEF (Nikon)
ORF (Olympus)
DNG (Adobe)
PEF (Pentax)
SRF (Sony)
X3F (Sigma)
ERF (Epson)
MOS (Mamiya)
RW2 (Panasonic)
FR3 (Hasselblad)
R3D (Red)

Office Documents

TXT (Text, including RTF files and UTF-8 text)
CSV (Comma Separated Values)
DOC and DOCX (Microsoft Word)
XLS and XLSX (Microsoft Excel)
PPT and PPTX (Microsoft Powerpoint)
PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format)
OpenOffice and LibreOffice documents

Other specialist file types

TTF (TrueType fonts)
OTF (OpenType fonts)
ZIP Archives
CD-ROM ISOs
Apple DMG 
Generic file storage (eg. HTML, JS, CSS, proprietary formats)

Video formats

MPEG1 (MPEG-1 Layer 1 Video)
MPEG2 (MPEG Layer II Compressed Video)
WMV (Windows Media Video)
MOV (Apple QuickTime)
AVI (Audio Video Interleave)
MPEG4 (MPEG-4 Video File)
FLV (Flash Video File)
RM (Real Media File)
M4V (iTunes Video File)
H264 / MP4 (H.264 high definition video)
Apple ProRes
Avid QuickTime

Audio Files

MPEG1 (MPEG-1 Layer 1 Audio)
MPEG2 (MPEG Layer II Compressed Audio)
MP3 (MP3 Audio)
WAV (WAVE Audio)
OGG (Ogg Vorbis Audio)
AAC (iTunes Advanced Audio Coding)
WMA (Windows Media Audio)

Integration Features

The Premium Edition gives you the option to access our REST API - the same API we use in all of our own code.

This edition is also ready to use with other systems as standard:

• Ready-made example plugin to use Third Light as your image library in WordPress
• Add dynamic feeds of new media to your intranet using our RSS features
• Import and export metadata via spreadsheets (ideal for migrating legacy content to Third Light)
• Connect your server to an OpenID provider for secure, federated access control.