Standard Edition

Features

Designed for web access

At the heart of Third Light's software is a simple and effective web-based app that gives you access to structured storage in folders.

Third Light makes viewing and browsing your files easy and fast, thanks to its thumbnail layout that loads quickly on any internet connection. View thumbnails in different sizes, sort orders and pagination options - you'll find your content has already been indexed for searching, too.

Slideshows, galleries and public areas can be added if you need to share with the world, or you can add passworded accounts. Create contact sheets for printing, download ZIP files, hover over thumbnails to preview or zoom in - try it and see the difference when you view digital media in a system built for visual users!

Graphics conversion tools

One of the most popular and important features of IMS is its powerful capabilities in converting between graphics formats.

Imagine the effort involved in extracting an image from a PDF and saving it for use on your web site. For most, this probably involves asking a graphics professional for help. However, in Third Light, instead of using complex desktop software you can resize any file you have stored, making the whole task very simple.

• Change the resolution (eg. convert from 300 dpi to 72 dpi)
• Change the colour space (eg. RGB to CYMK)
• Change from one format to another (eg. convert TIFF to JPEG)
• Resize and crop (eg. extract an image from a PDF to use on the web)

Passworded accounts and permissions

Third Light makes it easy to create user logins with specific access to just the content you want. Every user receives their own login and password, giving you effective and secure sharing. Since each user has their own login, you can easily share just the content needed using checkboxes to allocate permissions to particular folders.

Since IMS servers are designed to scale, we've made it possible to change the language, layout, features and privileges for every user individually, or use groups to save time on larger systems.

For example, if you need to give a web designer access to your files, you can limit the size of their downloads to web resolutions - or if you're working with a new customer, use watermarks to protect your intellectual property. Since every user is different, IMS is flexible to make sure you can match their needs accurately.

Upload files from Windows, MacOS or mobile devices

While working away from your desk, you can use our Apple iOS mobile application to upload files to your site, and if you need it, we also support FTP.

Intelligent search engine

The IMS Standard Edition incorporates our intelligent search system, helping you establish a search engine tailored to your exact needs. Our search engine offers two significant advantages:

1. Search suggestions If you search for "ocean", the search engine might suggest "sea", "water" and so on. This intelligence gives your users guidance, and a way to navigate by metadata without needing in depth knowledge of the content.
2. Click to explore advanced searches
   Search filtering and advanced rules can be accessed by clicking a box on the right hand side of the search results. Wherever possible, IMS avoids you having to use your keyboard.

Stored searches are also supported using Smart Folders, meaning you can organise your library by a mixture of metadata, date filters or specific rules that categorise your library.

Personalised for you and multi-lingual

Your Third Light site will look great out of the box, with a carefully designed and developed look and feel. If you need to change the colours or logo, you can do this in a few mouse clicks - and, if you feel like getting creative, you can edit down to the finest details using our templates editor. All editions of IMS are also ready to use with your own domain name.

IMS is also a multi-lingual product, with the ability to offer the user interface to different users or groups in their native language (including right-to-left languages).

e-Commerce Features

We have partnered with PhotoBox, one of Europe's most experienced digital printing labs, to offer an integrated printing and delivery service. You can sell a wide range of prints and gift items, delivered anywhere in the world. You remain in control of the prices, and the branding is personalised to your site throughout the ordering process.

Download licensing stipulating terms of use can be used to sell digital content under your preferred model (for example, with time or resolution or end use restrictions, or as a simple royalty-free sale).

Once a month, Third Light returns your profits to your bank or PayPal account.

• Built in invoicing and card payment features
• Support for tax zones, EU VAT territories, USA states, Canadian provinces
• Order management and revenue reconciliation tools
• Watermarking and anti-stitching features
• 5% card handling fee to use our PCI DSS compliant payment gateway

Logs and Audit Trails

As with any shared resource, it is important to keep a record of changes made - so Third Light keeps a secure, searchable audit trail for your site that helps you stay in control. Administrators can check how the system is being used at any time, using a range of reports:

• Detailed logs, graphs, tables and searchable records
• Search engine log, to help you refine your search results
• Login and download logs, for the whole system, or for specific users

Plugins and Tools

Working with media from your desktop is convenient using plugins that connect your favourite desktop software with your Third Light server. We offer three main plugins with the Third Light Standard Edition:

1. Plugin for Adobe Creative Suite, which enables Bridge to browse files in your IMS server directly;
2. Export tools for Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, allowing RAW workflows to push content directly to your Third Light site;
3. Purpose-built Upload Tool for Windows, iOS and Mac OS X which offers fast and easy uploads (we also support FTP).

When you upload files, your IMS server automatically generates thumbnails and rotates portrait files, giving you a fast and trouble-free way to build a professional library of your photography.

Prices

The Third Light Standard 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 Standard comes with an initial 50GB storage allocation and unlimited technical support by email.

Required Components

Popular Options

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

Additional Options

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

Case Studies

Scudamore’s Punting Company

Scudamore's Punting Company is one of Cambridge's oldest and most well-known tourism businesses, providing leisure tours of the River Cam using traditional craft known as punts. Scudamore's has been offering this immensely popular service for over 100 years.

Rod Ingersent, General Manager of Scudamore's explains how the business has harnessed the power of the web and digital marketing:

"At the heart of our operations is a fully digital business using cutting edge technology to market and promote our services to visitors from around the world. With an iconic location set in some of England's most beautiful and traditional architecture, we rely on photographs and videos to convey a sense of the unique experience that awaits our overseas visitors when they arrive. Over the years we have accumulated a very large media library."

Using Third Light has solved a critical problem that Scudamore's experienced before using Third Light IMS. Ingersent continues:

" The challenge we faced before we had Third Light IMS was how to find appropriate pictures and transfer them to printers, magazines, web sites and tourism agencies. This process was laborious at each step, and we were finding that many of the files we wanted to use were in the wrong technical format or too high a resolution to use, which was costing us time and overloading our mail server."

By solving these problems, Third Light IMS has become a key part of Scudamore's marketing efforts, and provides the central store for all of these important files.

"Now that we have Third Light IMS to manage our archive, we simply ensure that everything is uploaded to the digital library as soon as it is captured. We can then search at any time to find appropriate photos or videos based on keywords, time of year, location and other criteria. We send files directly to our suppliers at the right size and in the right format using Third Light's special 'publishing' feature - this way, what used to take all day is now just a few clicks. Best of all, when we publish files from IMS or send lightboxes to designers, we can continue to track these assets from the reporting tools in IMS."

"In the few years since it was first installed, our IMS system has become indispensable. It is easily coping with the very large volume of files that we are accumulating, and provides a fast and truly easy way to find and share files in the right format. It is one of the most useful tools in our business, and great value for money too. Without it, we would need a full-time staff member to perform the same work."

Rod Ingersent, Scudamore's Punting Company

▼ Read more…

Racingfotos

Racingfotos is a national press library for up-to-the-minute racing event photography, where speed of delivery is crucial. Pictures from multiple photographers are not only centrally stored and searchable, but they are also immediately distributed to the news desks of all of the major UK newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, within minutes of upload. This is achieved using IMS's unique FTP Manager.

Andy Watts, Co-Founder of Racingfotos comments:

"Following the introduction of Third Light's IMS into the Racingfotos.com web site our clients have only commented positively about the changes. The professional, clean look of the site, and its simplicity, speed and ease-of-use are crucial factors for clients sourcing images from internet based libraries."

"From our point of view, IMS has revolutionised our business, giving us far more control in the way our clients use our site, tailoring it exactly to the way the clients search for, and obtains their images. The administrative data produced from the IMS is invaluable for creating a better site for our clients."

"Third Light's team have been brilliant, listening and working with us to improve our business, a team we're glad to have on our side."

Andy Watts, Racingfotos

▼ Read more…

Royal National Lifeboat Institute

Portrush Lifeboat Station launched their website early in 2004, primarily as a resource for local fund-raising and to raise local awareness of the station's day-to-day activities. As well as streamlining the availability of images to press and public, the RNLI harnessed IMS's e-Commerce facility to generate much-needed funds to support its day to day operation.

"The RNLI plays a vital role in the life of many seaside villages, and there is always a lot of public interest in the powerful and evocative images of the volunteer lifeboat crews around the coast responding to emergencies at sea."

"Third Light's software allows us to easily manage our photograph library, selectively publishing pictures for the visitors to our website. As well as public access, IMS gives us the control to provide selected high-quality images on demand to the media for newspaper and magazine coverage of publicity events. We received several requests for printed copies of images, and realised that selling prints was an obvious way of raising a bit of extra money for our Crew Training Appeal. With IMS's PhotoBox integration we can not only sell prints, but also t-shirts, mugs and greeting cards - instantly available when we upload our pictures and without us having to charge, post or print anything ourselves. As a non-profit organisation, all the profits from these sales go to helping the Portrush crew save lives at sea."

Conchur Dickinson, Portrush RNLI

▼ Read more…

Specifications

Fast and Affordable Shared Hosting

The IMS Standard Edition is delivered from our carefully managed server facility, which provides ample computing capacity and exceptionally high standards of storage performance and reliability.

• Private cloud offering up to 200Mb/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 consistently achieve 99.98% uptime, independently monitored

Zero Maintenance

All updates are included free of charge in your annual subscription. Your subscription entitles you to continual upgrades with no need to pay for software. On our managed IMS Standard package, we keep your site updated and ensure you are always running the latest software for a completely trouble-free experience.

Security As Standard

Third Light's Standard Edition 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 Formats Supported

The IMS Standard Edition supports our full range of image file types, including an extensive range of RAW types. If you need to store video or documents, you may want to look at our next package up (Premium Edition).

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)

e-Commerce Services

The e-Commerce option provides print-on-demand integration with PhotoBox Ltd, providing access to sell prints and gift items, or you can use IMS to sell your own custom products (with complete order management built-in). Third Light provides a PCI DSS secure e-commerce checkout with card payments for Visa, MasterCard, Visa Delta, JCB cards in your choice of £, € or $ currencies.

Third Light charge 5% + VAT for the card handling services. At the end of each month, we return your revenue minus the costs via a BACS wire transfer, or PayPal.