Travel and Culture for the DAM

A faithful companion on our journeys, Michelin Editions has been offering maps and travel and restaurant guides since 1900 to help us explore regions around the world. Using thousands of media assets to illustrate its guides and in need of a powerful tool, Michelin Editions turned to our Ephoto Dam solution in 2021.

A market leader, Michelin Editions has been publishing millions of maps and guides for over 125 years, showcasing destinations through images. Given the volume of publications (travel, accommodation, and restaurant guides) and the number of stakeholders involved in the projects, a Digital Asset Management solution needed to be implemented.

Philippe Sablayrolles, Director of Cartography and Head of Information Systems at Michelin Editions, reflects on the challenges of implementing Ephoto Dam and the benefits it has brought.

Thousands of images, an increasing number of contributors, and a classification system that needs to be completely revised teams to integrate a photo library software into their editorial workflow. But the stakes were even higher for the group, which needed to organize and categorize media—and above all, be able to retrieve all images used in a given publication.

It was essential to consider the geographical scope, as well as the fact that images might appear in multiple publications or be shared among various stakeholders (communications and marketing, archives, editorial, image researchers).

For this publisher, rights management was an essential factor to consider, given the variety of media formats used. Indeed, a digital asset management tool like Ephoto Dam enables granular rights management on several levels.

First, regarding intellectual property: thanks to author and credit indexing, as well as rights expiration scheduling, this legal aspect is handled upstream, from the moment images are uploaded. Then, with file history tracking, it's possible to trace actions performed on media—such as downloads—and even contact users who have used a specific asset. Finally, user permissions within the DAM can be finely tuned to ensure everyone can carry out their daily tasks while preventing errors caused by overly broad access.

The tool was quickly adopted and widely used by everyone managing images or publications. "Ephoto Dam allows us to perform fast and efficient searches", explains Philippe Sablayrolles.

A reindexing process was implemented with our team. Indeed, it is rare for our clients to come without having already established some form of organization—more or less developed—that allows them to find media assets. The reindexing work thus preserves this effort by maintaining the services it provided, while optimizing the information for software dedicated to documentary management and therefore specialized.

A system using the Ephoto Dam API was also developed to automate the packaging of batches of images used in a publication or within a specific geographic scope.

Today, the Image Research team uses the solution daily to conduct their searches. Rights are clearly defined between administrators and users to avoid mishandling. A significant time savings has therefore been observed.

Some functions remain difficult to automate, according to Philippe Sablayrolles, who is convinced that productivity gains are still possible.

This is a challenge our team works on every day, notably through the integration of AI within the solution. In the future, media indexing will be performed by an AI specialized in the client’s corpus. This means the learning model will be based on what is indexed in the database rather than on impersonal, generalized big data.

The service provided will therefore be much more relevant and tailored to each client’s case. In this regard, Michelin is participating in our joint laboratory DAMIA Lab to accelerate this 100% French and sovereign research.

A solution that is unanimously praised within the group thanks to its intuitive usability.

The support from our team was effective and enabled a quick mastery of the solution. In regular contact with our team and involved in our product, Michelin Editions frequently shares improvement suggestions for the tool, which are incorporated into the Ephoto Dam roadmap to stay closely aligned with our clients’ practices.

The deployment of our new Front Office as well as our plugins, which offer the widest range among DAM providers, might be avenues to explore to further optimize tool adoption by everyone and the resulting time savings and accuracy.