We’re Helping Times Photojournalists Deliver Images to the World Faster
A mobile 5G-enabled system could allow us to send raw, high-resolution photos from a camera to the cloud almost instantaneously.
The challenge of sending photos to the newsroom
When New York Times photographer Doug Mills covered the State of the Union address in February of this year, he took 1,000 photos in under an hour. On the whole, Times photographers will capture anywhere between hundreds and thousands of photos for a given event. Taking tons of photos is part of the job: sometimes photographers need to shoot a lot to get that one perfect image. But once the event is over, getting those photos from the field to The Times newsroom is tedious and time consuming — two things journalists like to avoid during live news situations.
Typically, once a photographer is done shooting, they will go to their laptop and transfer the images from their camera. From there, they’ll select just a handful to crop and tone, add captions and upload the selected photos to the newsroom’s servers. This process takes time, which is a problem for things like sports events or natural disasters that we cover live.
Over the last few years, we’ve experimented with ways that leverage mobile internet technology to transmit our photos and get the story to our readers faster.
The Backpack: A wearable solution
In 2012, Josh Haner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and senior editor at The Times developed a tool that automatically sends thumbnails of Times photographers’ photos to the newsroom as the photos are captured.
Haner worked with The Times’s Interactive News team to build the device, called the “remote streaming photo backpack” (later, just “the Backpack”). The system fits together a computer, a cellular router for internet connectivity and a cellular multiplexer, which can send data across several cell networks at once. The multiplexer can also combine the throughput power of multiple internet connections, like wifi, ethernet, 3G and 4G.
As the photo thumbnails are transmitted live to the newsroom, photo editors in New York are able to review the thumbnail feed and selectively download high-resolution JPEG versions for publication.
The Backpack has been a powerful tool for our reporting, enabling a new capability of real-time photo coverage of events — from protests and debates to red carpets and sports. It also frequently helps us publish photos online minutes before our competitors, and sometimes a full day ahead in print.
Beyond being much faster, the Backpack’s amalgamated connectivity allows it to work well even when bandwidth is limited. When the power went out at the Super Bowl in 2013, for example, The Times was one of the few media companies to get photos out of the stadium.
Over the last couple of months, The Times’s 5G Journalism Lab has been exploring how higher and faster bandwidth could enable new ways for us to tell stories, and for our readers to experience them.
As part of our research, we’ve taken on the work of improving the Backpack and pushing its capabilities forward. Our goal is to rebuild the technology to make it faster, smaller and adaptable to more types of media and new devices.
An end-user approach
Before we built anything, we needed to understand what our photographers’ workflow looks like in different situations. I interviewed staff photographers and freelancers who have had connectivity problems while on the job in places like war zones in Syria, villages destroyed by earthquakes and the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
To get a deeper look, I shadowed Doug Mills, The Times’ White House photographer and frequent user of the Backpack, to learn about The Times’s photo workflow and the rhythm of a typical photo assignment. Observing Mills and interviewing his colleagues gave us the understanding needed to start building something that could actually be used.
A new proof of concept
Our latest take on the Backpack, pictured below, has many of the same features as its predecessor, but we’ve updated the components to make the transmission of data faster and to reduce power consumption. We also plan to significantly reduce its size.
For now, though, it’s most important to be able to troubleshoot our prototype on the spot, so we built this first version into a portable workstation that includes a built-in screen.
Here are some of the upgrades that we’re most excited about:
- Transmission of full RAW images: The old Backpack would compress and downsize images before automatically transmitting them back to the newsroom. In the new version, we’re automatically sending every full uncompressed RAW image to newsroom servers at the moment the photo is taken. This will ensure that every photo is stored on our servers, equipping our editors with a robust repository of tagged photos for future use.
- USB tethering: Because the old system used an ethernet cable, it could only connect to DSLR cameras. The new version allows USB devices to be connected, which dramatically expands the type of media it can transmit. This opens up the possibility of using formats with massive file sizes and long production times — like 360-degree video and 3D volumetric content — in breaking news situations.
- 5G ready: The new version is built to connect to 5G networks once they roll out. The mobile 5G standard claims it will enable us to send high-quality 40MB RAW photos in under a second (an expected order-of-magnitude improvement). This would significantly enhance our ability to cover live events.
Back to the field
The Backpack’s new hardware, firmware and server setup have proven to work well together in our lab tests, but reporting from the field presents unpredictable challenges. To test the new Backpack’s performance in a live news situation, we recently handed it off to photographer Christian Hansen while he was out on assignment to cover the Kentucky Derby for The Times.
We’ll share what we learned in our next post.
Jimmy Chion is a Creative Technologist with the 5G Lab at The New York Times.
