I, Mareen Fischinger, the founder of Lumio, have been working as a professional photographer ever since digital photography had taken over completely.
Throwing myself and my work out there in a world with the picture editors, art directors and lithographers from what was not yet considered »the old days«, I realized how processes of presenting and delivering my work had not evolved with the technical progress which was brought by digital photography: Every client seemed to either have their work-around or knew not at all what to do. Some could not open the zipped files which I uploaded onto my server via FTP, some did not know how to talk about images and kept referring to imaginary photo count numbers which they made up as we were talking on the phone, because their email program deleted all file information as pictures were being sent. I was not so fond of using third-party services, because none of them were made for this purpose and all had to be explained.

My efforts of consistently naming my files and using all kinds of programs to maintain an order and generate PDFs were useless at times. And in the end, it often went back to time-consuming talks over the phone or in person to avoid misunderstandings, and in the end, to commissioning a courier to send physical media, such as CDs or HDDs.
I was tired of the way how nobody seemed to know what is the easiest way: a system that combines and unifies the processes and closes the gaps in communication. It had to be controlled by the photographer who is the one working with mostly unexperienced counterparts.

In early April 2009, a pre-version of Lumio started as Mareen Fischinger’s professional »fotoarchiv«, with thought-out basics and a looong weekend’s work of backend and frontend. Finally, I was able to send people (clients/models) links, they could see what they wanted, enlarge, pick and download.

See a personal blog post from April 2009

Within the first year, I noted all the imperfections and common mistakes which were made by myself and the user. Also, a lot of constraints still existed, mainly on the technical side, some on the functional.
So I decided to improve the system even more and then make it globally available.

I then talked to a couple of developers. An old friend of mine is an information architect in Berlin — the young company where he is a partner seemed like a good fit to Lumio and were personally interested in my project as I eagerly presented it to them in April 2010. We took down ideas and what was there to improved. How it could be structured, which sprints were going to happen and when. Since then, the new workflow and communication tool has been in the making.

The name Lumio came to me in mid-May, after days of thinking and talking with photographers and photo editors. It derives from the Roman languages, where lux and lumen are the words for light, glow etc. Because that is what Lumio is. A giant and complex lightbox — talking in terms of how our activities with the software would physically translate.

It is very important to me that this online software is close to the ones who use it and I want to constantly improve it. There are a lot of things in my head which are not yet implemented, and I am sure there will come up more as Lumio is being used for everyday’s work.

So now, after 18 months of delightful struggle, I am even more excited and cannot wait to present my clients my photographic assignments within a system which is beautiful and easy to use for both sides.