NTSB Managing Director David Mayer formed the Photo Task Force to develop overarching policy, procedure and processes to effectively collect, store, manage and use photographs.   This policy applies to investigative and non-investigative photos including those used for outreach, advocacy, media and communications purposes, branding, outreach, and other Safety Board activities.

Recently, the task force conducted a month-long survey of NTSB employees regarding their basic and advanced photo editing needs, such as stitching and vector graphing.

“The information gathered from the survey will drive selection and acquisition of additional basic and advanced photo editing software to supplement the capabilities of existing Microsoft tools such as Picture Manager, PowerPoint and Word,” said Bob Scherer, NTSB’s Chief Information Officer.

The survey also revealed that a number of Safety Board employees are not aware of the basic photo editing capabilities existing in Microsoft tools. As a result, a set of quick reference guides is under development to assist employees who need only a very basic set of photo editing features.  The results of the survey have been compiled into two presentations: Survey Summary Results and Survey Detailed Data.  The summary presentation offers highlights of the survey results, while the detailed presentation provides a question-by-question analysis and includes all comments received from participants.

The task force is co-chaired by Bob Scherer and Tom Roth-Roffy (MS), and has multi-disciplinary representation from across the Safety Board.