"Digital Railroad" makes it easier for photographers, agencies, newspapers or anyone interested in distributing photographs anywhere in the world through the Internet.

If you are a photographer and you want to sell your work as if you had your very own agency, this might work for you.

If your photo stock is small there are other solutions, some programs with analogous functions could help you get similar results, such as iView Media and Portfolios, which will be discussed in a forth coming edition of ZoneZero magazine.

""Digital Railroad"" offers 10Gb of on-line space to store images, which can be in either low or high resolution. You can also make small presentations called “light boxes” which are sent via e-mail as hypertext links to potential customers.

If anyone is interested in buying a picture, access is given to download the file in high resolution for a better view, thus avoiding the need to burn a CD or make a print that have to be sent via the regular mail, this represents an advantage for the photographer since it shortens the time that the buyer has to decide to buy the photograph. In addition, you deal directly with the customers and there are no commissions to be paid if the work is sold.

This website is of special interest to photographers that have a large stock of images and distribute them to publications or companies.

When subscribing to "Digital Railroad", you get your very own site, which can be easily personalized through user-friendly design tools.

Images are uploaded through your navigator or FTP program; the pictures are automatically copied in low resolution by the network to be edited. Access can be given to other people to edit, select, download and publish the photographs without waiting time.

This means that a reporter could be in Iraq and his editor in New York. The editor could check out the photographer’s work every day and ask for the information he needs to edit and discuss it with his or her colleagues, and each one can download and publish automatically through the "Digital Railroad" network.

All the big photo agencies have a server that transmits information via FTP. The problem with these servers is that you have to upload and download all the images, which is time consuming and sometimes the servers are flooded which makes for even longer delays.

With "Digital Railroad", photographers administer their own websites, which speeds up the process.

There are plenty of photographers and editors that have tried "Digital Railroad" and have liked it. In my experience, after trying it out myself, I would like to invite you to visit this website and get acquainted with this solution.

Mariana Gruener
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I am including a list of photographers that have used this network and make comments about their experience.

Article:

http://talks.blogs.com/phototalk/2004/08/digital_railroa.html

http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/digitalrailroad/digitalrr.html