Having lived in the IT industry, and serviced the print and advertising industry for almost 20 years I have lost my hair, gone grey, carry too much weight and look older then I really am ... but the dog still seems pleased to see me, especially when I feed him.

Consequently I find it much more appropriate to call the leading edge, the bleeding edge because it has certainly had its pound of flesh from me. However, it never fails to amaze me how people take technology and adapt it or repurpose it to make money.

Having said that, throughout my career I have seen many companies die through a failure to adapt to the rapid pace of change inflicted by the IT industry - in particular the photographic industry which sat on a 40-year-old chemical process, with no real change, until digital photography introduced a six-month product life cycle.

As a result many great companies died, often very quickly. So, on such a sober note it is nice to see a business turn the industry on its head and succeed globally with technology. It is even nicer that this company is based in NZ.

The business came about through a long and contrived path. Historically, the paparazzi would shoot a couple of rolls of film, get them processed and shipped off to a picture library, the library would then duplicate these images and put them on a plane in a Fed Ex wallet and ship them off to every corner of the globe.

There their syndication partners would sell the images to magazines, who would get them scanned and ready for print, all in all a very costly process.

Let's move 10 years back; the paparazzi can now shoot thousands of images digitally and distribute globally, instantly, with negligible cost.

Problem: Millions of images in one big pot means that finding the right image quickly is very difficult, if not impossible. A scenario which might sound familiar?

This is where our NZ hero steps up to the plate. More Images on Broadway used to be such a syndication partner, but as the old process died and digital photography and the internet changed the dynamics of the business, More Images formed Keedup.com.

The basic principle of this business was to insert keywords into images, knowing that if the keywording is inaccurate, misspelt, inappropriate or unsuitable the search results show up negative so the potential user (or account manager) quickly moves on.

The keywording software created by More Images used concepts of word groups, captioning, and nippy lists to apply words quickly, consistently and easily to the image, using IPTC fields to manage the information.

As an ad agency, we work with images or video clips every day, often buying new images because old ones are not found easily. We know it is stored somewhere but we just can't put our hands on it.

Keedup.com is delivering keywording to picture libraries, brand owners, publishers and ad agencies all over the world, making it easy for them to find the right image easily and efficiently.

The proof of its success is clear to see; from a standing start two years ago to 14,000-plus images a week, two shifts, operating 24 hours a day.

As a user of images in a digital environment, finding the right image quickly and efficiently is paramount to meeting deadlines and profitability, and yet we still just drop them in a folder and hope they will surface at the right time as if by magic.

Chris Graham (chrisg@premedia.co.nz) is a specialist IT solutions consultant for the graphic arts and print industry.