In multimedia projects, a good database can make customized and multiplatorm production easier, but most publications are made up of mostly new images, and it's hard to pinpoint a hard dollar savings from putting all the old stuff on-line. Conventional graphic arts industry wisdom has it that printers will manage the image databases for their customers. They have the high res files, they have the computers and they know how to do production work. The problem is that the printer usually has the images that are least needed in a database since prepress files contain the images already used in print, not the images that will be used to make new print. Maybe there's some value in the reprint business, but the big creative payback comes from giving the designers and art directors total access to all available images on file, not just the stale ones that will probably never be used again.
Printers also have too much resolution.
Most photos will have to be re-scanned for size and crop anyway, so you may as well save the substantial hardware investment needed for a full res database. A multimedia database is useful if you want to use more images more freely in your work. Be attentive to the power and importance of excellent indexing. Forget prepress, except if you're using the same images over and over. Visit The EP Diary Forum .