Silverlight Image Manager for SharePoint

Envision IT has found that image management for a SharePoint web site poses numerous challenges for organizations.  With many content contributors, it can be difficult to enforce standards on image size and quality.  It is also difficult for contributors to find the most appropriate images that they need. The primary concerns around image management are as follows:

• Images are too large, causing long download times
• Images have been stretched without respect to their aspect ratio, resulting in distortion
• Browsers can distort image quality when resizing large images for display
• User must go through multiple screens using OOB SharePoint Image Picker
• Finding the desired image can be difficult
• Images are duplicated
• Quality of the images may be poor

To experience SLIM first-hand, go to our live Silverlight demo site which will allow you to browse our site's images through SLIM itself.

Image resizing without regard for aspect ratio results in distortion and poor quality:

Standard image search in SharePoint:

Envision IT's Silverlight Image Manager replaces the standard image management controls in SharePoint with a set of custom Silverlight pages with the following features:

• The ability to have corporate images stored in one or more central locations accessible by all web sites.
• Ability to set metadata such as keywords on images
• Rich searching from within the image browser
• Image thumbnails and full images available for viewing when browsing
• Ability to upload new images
• Images are stored in multiple libraries that are accessible based on user permissions
• When an image is resized, a web-optimized shadow copy is sized and stored on the server to ensure optimum quality and size
• When resizing images, the ability to change the aspect ratio can be locked to ensure integrity of the image.
• MOSS search is used behind the scenes to display where an image is currently being used in any number of sites (including shadow copies)

The Silverlight Image Manager provides convenient thumbnail search through multiple libraries with quick-touch selection and web property editing:

As well as supporting images stored in SharePoint (through SharePoint List Web services) it also allows support for RSS feeds and Bing and Google Image search for Image Library content. The Envision IT Silverlight Image Manager for SharePoint provides for a highly enhanced user experience with images that load faster, look better and are easier to find and share among teams.  The positive impact is that content authors (who are typically not web content experts) are able to effectively manage their images and web content. 

This mitigates the following issues:

• Not being able to find an appropriate image
• Stretching images outside of their normal aspect ratio, resulting in distorted and poor quality images
• Leaving images in large sizes, resulting in very slow page load times and impacting site performance
• Not understanding where else an image is being used, and what impact changes to that image can have

Compare standard editing of image properties in SharePoint out-of-the-box  (left) vs the new dialog in Envision IT's editor (right):

The end results are :

• Quicker download times with properly sized web quality images
• Correctly proportioned images with no distortion
• Content authors can tell where an image is used throughout any number of web sites
• Minimal steps and screens
• Images are easier to find and more effective for the team
• No more duplicate images
• Rich display of image collections
• Image library segregation and sharing as appropriate
• It makes using SharePoint for Web content management an enjoyable experience

The Silverlight Image Manager for SharePoint is available from $5,995. Please contact us for more details at (905) 812-3009 or sales@envisionit.com.