Case Study: Teylers Museum achieves faster high-resolution image delivery and reduced storage costs with Extensis Portfolio & MrSID

Digitizing 230 Years of High-Resolution History

Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands — the world’s best-preserved 18th-century public knowledge institution with a collection dating back more than 230 years — faced the challenge of managing and sharing hundreds of thousands of high-resolution digitized assets. Their existing Collections Management System handled curatorial data but not original high-res imagery, so the museum needed a Digital Asset Management solution to fully catalog and index images, serve them securely and quickly, and reduce storage costs without compromising visual quality.

In 2010 the museum implemented Extensis Portfolio with the NetPublish add-on and used MrSID compression to manage exceptionally large images. This combination allowed fast, secure sharing and reduced file sizes by more than half (for example, a 6.4 GB PSD became a 2.93 GB .SID), cutting storage costs and greatly speeding search and delivery. Staff and external users report clearer, faster previews and easier access to high-resolution images while preserving image fidelity.

Teylers Museum

Martijn Zegel

Photography, Reproductions and Rights