"Lokalise is pretty good at enabling you to use the same keys for iOS, Android, and the web simultaneously. Our mobile developers make active use of this functionality."
Tatiana Grebenyuk, localization manager
Depositphotos is an international photo and video bank founded in 2009 by the Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Sergeev. Today the Depositphotos file collection includes more than 67 million images and videos. The company itself is present in about twenty markets around the world.
Depositphotos has already been localized into twenty languages. The photo bank team decided to move to an automated translation system about two years ago. Since then five internal projects have been managed using Lokalise: the website itself, photo bank mobile apps, the Crello online graphical editor, the Lightfield photo studio portal and social media publications.
Before switching to Lokalise, the team used an SQL database that had grown to include 120,000 keys. Many of them were no longer required. However, they could not be deleted: separating the keys that were still needed from the ones that were not was an unmanageable task.
The actual idea of using Lokalise arose when Depositphotos’ CEO read about the platform and found it interesting. The desire for an integrated localization system coincided with what they found out about Lokalise, while the service’s price quote was satisfactory.
Roman Drogolov notes that after adopting Lokalise they saw the size of the database shrink more than 25-fold (to about 5,000 keys). The data could now easily be brought into order and filtered according to the proper parameters. One of the main advantages of Lokalise localization software for him is the integration of webhooks into the project, together with the fact that his team could adapt some of them to suit their needs. For instance, the Slack webhook was modified to log changes to localization keys.
Tatiana Grebenyuk notes that Depositphotos went over to Lokalise in the hope that it would make the localization procedure simpler, faster and more efficient for all participants. Today, when translators have access to the localization system without there being any risk they will accidentally “break” it, work has become much easier for everyone: localizers, developers, and translators.
After the transition to the new system, the time spent working on localization was cut in half. If one language had previously taken four months of continuous work, now it could be done in two to two and a half months.
The Depositphotos manager regards the main advantages of Lokalise as being its ease of use, the ability to calmly give translators access to the database, the translation history feature, and also the ability to filter by keys.
Depositphotos is satisfied with Lokalise and plans to continue this partnership.
"Lokalise makes Ding happy by streamlining their localization workflow"
