James Ferrazzano runs Posterazzi.com — the most complete poster retailer on the Web — which offers over 500,000 titles for immediate delivery. Based in Chester, New York, he employs a team of nearly 20 people and uses Mylio to keep the company’s workflow moving efficiently. Here’s how he manages his image-focused business.
Tell us about your business.
We’re the Web’s most complete poster and print store, offering fine art prints and posters, movie and music posters, mini prints, giclée prints, serigraphs, and related products and services. Movies, music, television sports, people, Abstract, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Surrealism — everything.
How has your business evolved?
We’ve been selling posters and art prints since 2007. We license images from rights holders and publishers, then print, sell and ship directly to consumers. Over the years, the way we do business has gone more and more digital, which means we don’t have to stock as much inventory. Now we can print and ship on demand.
How does your business use Mylio?
Mylio is the hub for all of our production. It’s the only tool we use to manage the images. We use it to sync workflow for a large inventory of images over multiple workstations. I love the way Mylio backs up images to all our different devices. Knowing that our images are backed up in so many locations makes me feel very secure.
How do you manage half a million images?
We have one network-attached storage (NAS) device is connected to 14 work stations — a mix of Macs and PCs — each with an external hard drive backup that manages 200,000-plus images. We keep the source (full-quality) images for our products on the NAS. Mylio is the air-traffic control system to manage workflow for those images across the different workstations.
The images are organized in folders, by topic area. Each member of our production staff has a list of items to print for the day. They bring up those images in the Mylio app and can see by how the photo is rated what next step needs to be taken before printing.
How does Mylio improve Posterazzi’s workflow?
Using Mylio’s ratings feature, my staff can tell what needs to be done next. Each image is tagged according to what they need to do to the image, such as editing, resizing, or whatever. We use all three ratings — colors, stars, and flags — and can sort the images by these ratings at any time.
For instance, we deal with agencies or museums to source some of the older fine art images like a Van Gogh or Renoir. Because the digital image comes from a physical piece of art, sometimes we’ll see a glare or other imperfection. We tag the image with a yellow rating, which means it’s good but can be improved. By filtering for all the yellow ratings along with provider tags, we can see when we’ve reached critical mass for a particular provider, and ask them for a bulk rescan.
What’s your best advice for a new Mylio user?
Try to get your folder structure and workflow in order before you import your images into Mylio. It just makes the setup that much quicker and easier.
Likewise, decide up front which of your staffers (or devices) will need which type of image size — thumbnail, medium, or full size. Not every one of your employees needs full-sized images. At Posterazzi, for instance, customer service isn’t editing any images. They just need thumbnails for their calls and emails. Optimizing the file sizes by each device means you are also optimizing your overall sync speeds.
Download and try Mylio today to discover whether it might be a good fit for your small business.
