Integrating Lokalise into the world’s largest photo bank: the experience of Depositphotos
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.
Industry
Photography
Type
B2B / B2C
The Problem
Before going over 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 entirely satisfactory.
The Solution
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 for him is the integration of web hooks 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.
"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." Roman Drogolov, web developer
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 unbroken 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.
"It’s convenient that you can write comments and attach screenshots, so as to provide translators with some context for a particular key." Tatiana Grebenyuk, localization manager
Depositphotos is satisfied with Lokalise and plans to continue this partnership.
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Lokalise is very good: the team is nice and caring about your needs and the software is awesome. A lot of features and integrations make it easy to collaborate with external translators, because the platform gives you an overview of the translation state.
Our devs add the keys, our designers review them, and we have multiple people from multiple translations companies and internal people translating our content. Seems like a nightmare, but Lokalise makes it super easy and organized.
We manage translations for Android, iOS and backend applications through Lokalise - a simple and intuitive web application. It makes us work faster and react to change almost instantly.
Lokalise is a fantastic platform, with top-notch support. You will not be disappointed.
Lokalise’s Live SDK allowed us to free ourselves from the tyranny of updating localized keys in each app release.
At Ding we are always looking at ways to improve our service and processes – Lokalise helped us to do this – we would recommend Lokalise to all prospective users.
We choose Lokalise because it’s convenient that you can write comments and attach screenshots to the translated keys. The work has become much easier for everyone.
Lokalise is a very useful tool, with great support. Make sure to use them if you want an efficient translation process.
Localization is key to enter new markets. Lokalise has helped us to streamline the process of translating our product into 18 languages.
Lokalise is really recommended if you want some easy to use, feature-rich and great customer support service for localization. Now we can update texts remotely without having to release a new app update. This is a huge advantage.
The mobile SDK is a must to keep your apps free from typos and other common localization issues. This really streamlined our workflow here at Shapr. The excellent support team has always provided speedy, helpful responses.
Our current workflow in Lokalise: when a copywriter populates all 3 languages, we trigger a CI pipeline, which exports iOS and Android localization bundles and integrates them into our application repositories. We use a separate github public repo to push/version all localization files. Pretty simple.
Uploading and tagging screenshots is one of the Lokalise features I like most. This allows us to easily provide context for the translators and improve the quality of our translations. Messaging, notifications, integrations, they all contribute to providing better quality translations.
The major improvement we’ve seen is regarding the adoption rate and the praise from our global teammates. With Lokalise, they finally have one place to go to update or modify translations. With the ability to update in the same place we pull translations, turnaround time is much faster.
Localization is a difficult part of a project, Lokalise has the key features to provide a complete lifecycle and allows developers and translators to collaborate in the internationalization of projects.
Deploying Lokalise has had a huge success among all our teams. Everyone loves it. It allowed us to have a comprehensive overview of our translations and improve them rapidly.
Lokalise has a very user-friendly interface, the filters and tags are extremely helpful in keeping everything organized and the in-line editor which synchs in both directions is a very neat little tool. Even just being able to attach screenshots to provide context has been a huge timesaver. Overall, Lokalise does exactly what it's supposed to do and the constant development has improved the software already so much over the time I've been working with it. However, the most noteworthy thing is the outstanding customer support that deals with questions and issues in record time.
