Most in-house creative teams face the issue of corporate images scattered throughout their department. Each designer ends up with a different assortment of photos they’ve compiled over the years. Collections of photos end up stored in individual project folders — even if those same images end up linked later to a dozen other projects.

Over the last several years at Creativetechs, we’ve helped a lot of in-house creative teams develop image management and keywording strategies get control over their unwieldily image collections. In the end, they create something like their own private in-house stock image library.

Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed an online autotrace tool that is dramatically more accurate than the LiveTrace tool available in Adobe Illustrator, or the old Adobe Streamline utility that some designers still have lurking around their hard drive. Even better it’s free! VectorMagic is available as an online tool on their website:

vectormagic.stanford.edu

You upload your bitmap image, answer a couple questions about the original image, and the system creates a vector EPS version that you can download and edit. Their example results are stunning, and from our own experiments at Creativetechs with a few real-world projects, the results are impressive.

The interface is fairly straight-forward. But if you get lost they also have a quick 3-minute video tutorial showing the system in action. Give it a shot.