Wirtualna Polska Media: Making time for quality content with automated image recognition
About Wirtualna Polska Media
Based in Warsaw, Poland, Wirtualna Polska Media is home to one of Poland’s most visited news websites, along with lifestyle and entertainment sites, a widely viewed over-the-air television station, and e-commerce services. With 8.1 million users, it provides audiences with breaking news, comment, and features, along with stories and trivia from the entertainment world.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usWirtualna Polska Media integrated Vision AI into its central image repository, automating image recognition and tagging to enable journalists to search for images quickly and easily.
Google Cloud results
- Enables journalists to search image repository effectively with automated image tagging from Vision AI
- Cuts time spent manually tagging images by 45 seconds per image
- Streamlines workflows, allowing journalists to focus on content creation
Saves 400 work hours a month with Vision AI
For large media companies, AI presents challenges and opportunities alike. While almost three-quarters of news organizations believe that generative AI can help with time-consuming tasks, freeing up journalists to focus on creative work, more than 60 percent are concerned about the impact of AI on journalistic standards of accuracy and fairness.
Wirtualna Polska Media, which runs one of the most visited news sites in Poland, is experiencing these challenges and opportunities first hand. Incorporating a wide range of news and lifestyle websites, as well as an over-the-air TV station, the media group faces a challenge from smaller, less reputable organizations using generative AI to repurpose their content and publish it on their own sites, with none of the associated costs. At the same time, Wirtualna Polska Media is fast improving its operational efficiencies by embracing Google Cloud AI solutions that allow its journalists to focus on the work they do best.
The challenge of finding the right picture to tell the story
One such time-consuming task is finding the right images for content. Previously, this involved a journalist searching through numerous stock sites and image libraries until they found the right image, with suitable usage rights, to accompany their article. This took up a significant amount of journalists' time, reducing the amount of written content they could produce.
"Journalists found it wasn't possible to browse through all the photos and find what they were looking for. As a result, they stopped using the system and returned to searching the sites individually. That's when we started looking at Google Cloud AI solutions."
—Marcin Kurzyna, Director of Media Technology and Innovation, Wirtualna Polska MediaKeen to streamline this process, Wirtualna Polska Media created an aggregated central image repository, bringing all the images from the various libraries together in one place. However, with thousands of images being added to the repository every day, journalists found it difficult to search for photos effectively, as images were inconsistently tagged, with many descriptions failing to adequately describe what was pictured.
"Journalists found it wasn't possible to browse through all the photos and find what they were looking for," explains Marcin Kurzyna, Director of Media Technology and Innovation, Wirtualna Polska Media. "As a result, they stopped using the system and returned to searching the sites individually. That's when we started looking at Google Cloud AI solutions."
Automating processes and saving labor with Vision AI
Wirtualna Polska Media needed a way to tag the millions of images in its repository in a detailed and uniform way, to allow its journalists to be able to search for images quickly and effectively. By integrating Vision AI into its image repository, it was able to automate the entire tagging process from start to finish.
Now, every time an image reaches the repository, Vision AI analyzes the image to identify its content, before tagging the image with a set of metadata along with a safe search classification. Translation API then translates the metadata into Polish, enabling local journalists to find the image they want quickly and easily. And because any manual uploads to the repository are also automatically tagged in this way, they no longer require manual tagging, saving around 45 seconds of labor per image.
"With Vision AI, our repository now works as intended," says Kurzyna. "Our journalists no longer need to waste time wading through different services for images, as they now have a central, searchable portal with all the images in one place. We have saved almost 400 work hours a month."
Taking the complexity out of image-use licensing
Another benefit of the image repository is that it enables Wirtualna Polska Media to keep track of the number of times each image is used by the media group. Previously, each image use would have to be logged manually, taking up valuable time and resulting in certain uses not being recorded, leading to out-of-date image-use licenses that would need renewing and more wasted time correcting these oversights. Now that Vision AI is helping to ensure that the image repository is working as it should, Wirtualna Polska has an automatically updated log of how each image is used, enabling it to keep licenses up to date.
Likewise, when a license or permission to use an image is revoked, having all the images tracked makes it easy to identify all the articles in which that photo was used and replace it with a contextually appropriate image that has a valid license.
Proper image license management is not only a matter of legal compliance but also about maintaining the integrity and reputation of a media company. In the digital age, where content is vast and dynamic, leveraging technology to ensure the appropriate use of licensed material becomes essential. Swift identification and replacement of images can prevent potential legal disputes and safeguard a company's brand image.
Freeing journalists to write the content that counts
As a result of all these efficiencies, Kurzyna explains, Wirtualna Polska journalists are now able to dedicate more time to the work they do best. "Thanks to Vision AI, our journalists spend less time on manual labor, and more time uncovering unique stories, conducting in-depth research, and writing the kind of quality content our readers expect."
"Thanks to Vision AI, our journalists spend less time on manual labor, and more time uncovering unique stories, conducting in-depth research, and writing the kind of quality content our readers expect."
—Marcin Kurzyna, Director of Media Technology and Innovation, Wirtualna Polska MediaWirtualna Polska is now looking at how Google Cloud AI could streamline its processes further, and is in the process of exploring how AI models could be used in content moderation to save resources. Kurzyna is particularly excited about the potential of generative AI to help save time in content creation. He is testing Google Cloud models to see how they could help in reducing the manual labor around tasks, such as reviewing, summarizing, and fact checking, giving journalists more time to focus on generating original content that they're passionate about.
"Vision AI made our image repository possible. Without it, it would be almost unusable, as we wouldn't have been able to develop such a model on our own. We now see generative AI as the next step, and are evaluating Google Cloud AI solutions to streamline our processes even further."
—Marcin Kurzyna, Director of Media Technology and Innovation, Wirtualna Polska Media"Vision AI made our image repository possible," adds Kurzyna. "Without it, it would be almost unusable, as we wouldn't have been able to develop such a model on our own. We now see generative AI as the next step, and are evaluating Google Cloud AI solutions to streamline our processes even further."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Wirtualna Polska Media
Based in Warsaw, Poland, Wirtualna Polska Media is home to one of Poland’s most visited news websites, along with lifestyle and entertainment sites, a widely viewed over-the-air television station, and e-commerce services. With 8.1 million users, it provides audiences with breaking news, comment, and features, along with stories and trivia from the entertainment world.