Release details

These are the final release notes.

AI focal point cropping

Use AI image recognition to identify focal points in an image, and use the Media Editor to crop and convert as needed.

Responsive design patterns are state-of-the-art for websites, landing pages, and online product catalogs. They require images and videos to be placed once and resized or cropped based on devices and other criteria. Maximizing the impact of each visual is crucial to attracting users' attention and converting sales.

Focal point cropping, with each image cropped to keep the focus on the key elements at each size, is now easier than ever. You select the AI-delivered main point of interest (focal point) and crop automatically around it, focusing on the selected key element.

AI tagging in Picturepark will therefore propose additional focal points, which you can use in the media editor for cropping. These AI-delivered focal points will consider all possible areas of interest for you - without the need to set them yourself.
 

In the image, you find various areas, for example, House, Tree, or Plant. AI can also propose brand names, text, or demographics depending on your chosen model. AI technology will add such focal points to a layer “Image Analytics”, from which you can pick the ones to apply as a crop onto your images in the Media Editor.

You can further define the required height and width - the output dimensions (for example, 16:9) and other settings. Given the requested width and height, the resulting image preserves as much of the region of interest as possible. 

Further Changes - You can use a new crop parameter "auto" in the embed URL to set the crop rectangle to the ideal dimensions for the selected focal point.

Limitation - AI Tagging in Picturepark can either return focal points (regions with names) or concepts (keywords/tags). It is not possible to configure both tagging options for the same instance; they are either focal points or tags.
 

User-centered automation rules

Create Business Rules based on the actions of your specific users and user groups.

Business Rules in Picturepark automate your data management and are now extended with user-centered conditions. These new user-centered conditions, such as the “User in User Roles” condition, allow you to automate processes based on actions performed by particular users or user roles, such as:

• Assign default permission when your agency uploads the content.
• Assign default tags and keywords when your photographers upload.
• Send notifications to specific users or user roles when your external suppliers change metadata.
• Check if product content was made public by a product manager; otherwise, revoke permission.
• Check if sales content was validated by the product manager and request validation.
• And many more.
  
  

  

Further Changes in Business Rules 

• A new variable, NOW, is available for automation to check whether a specific release or embargo date is approaching. For instance, you can calculate “NOW + 5 Days” to check for an embargo date that expires five days from now.
• A new “contains” condition checks if any input contains specific text, for example, if the filename contains product, to apply the product layer automatically. Previously, this process was only possible with complex RegEx, but it has now been simplified.
• A name and description field was added to describe each step of a business rule. It helps you better document a business rule directly where you configure it, supporting your corporate business governance strategy.
• The condition to check if a layer was changed now also supports checking if multiple layers of a Content Item have changed.
   

Display Pattern editor preview

Preview your Display Patterns without prior rendering in the extended Display Pattern Editor.

With this release, the Display Pattern Editor offers an exact preview of what your Display Patterns look like without rendering all content items in Picturepark, which took some time while you waited. 

This is especially helpful for Virtual Items and Thumbnail Previews (overlays), where you can show graphical information in the top left, bottom left, and bottom right corners, such as icons, text in different colors, and more.
 

Kubernetes scalability

Get ready for even better scalability with the Picturepark Content Platform, which is now deployed using Kubernetes as a container orchestrator.

We switched our deployment to Kubernetes, which reduces internal efforts for managing the architecture, unavailability during releases and maintenance windows, and further improves the scalability of our Picturepark Cloud.

Kubernetes is a compact, portable open-source platform for managing applications like Picturepark, originally developed by Google.

Benefits of Kubernetes, which we have started to use, include:

• Scalability: Scale up certain services based on load indicators, and more.
• Load Balancing: Balance incoming traffic load to all containers and systems evenly.
• Automatic Packing: Handling any number of containers on its own.
• Self-Healing: Replace a broken container in due time to maintain the capacity and bandwidth of the system.
• Powerful CI/CD (which means continuous integration and development): Kubernetes will gradually deploy to the entire swarm of containers.
• Storage orchestration: Scale storage systems of all kinds - including local storage, public cloud providers, etc.