Photo captures
A photo capture is a photograph of the physical screen, taken while a particular advertisement was on it. It is visual evidence that the advertisement appeared on a real installation, in addition to a player’s log of the playback.
The interface calls this a shot. That word does not mean an ad play anywhere in CityScreen Context; it always means the photograph.
This page is for the employees of an organization that sells screens fitted with cameras.
Photo capture and proof of play
Proof of play, in the industry sense, is the automated report confirming that a specific advertisement ran on a specific screen at a specific time. In CityScreen Context that role is filled by the confirmed ad play itself — see the counting model.
A photo capture is the separate, photographic form of evidence. It exists only for the faces whose content management system supplies one, and it does not affect counting or pricing in any way. A campaign with no photo captures at all is counted, reported and billed exactly like one with a full set.
Where captures come from
CityScreen Context does not operate cameras and does not request photographs.
When a synchronization pass reads playback records from a content management system, some of those records carry the address of a photograph taken at that playback. The platform downloads that image and keeps it. Records with no photograph attached pass through untouched.
Whether a face has a camera at all is recorded on the face and advertised to demand partners; see What you can edit. Whether photographs actually arrive is a property of the content management system.
Two layers, two lifetimes
| Layer | What it holds | How long it is kept |
|---|---|---|
Working copy |
One photograph per confirmed opportunity, exactly as it arrived |
About an hour |
Permanent set |
Up to three canonical photographs per advertisement and face, one per day part |
Kept indefinitely |
The working copy exists so that the permanent set can be assembled and so that a demand partner can fetch the photograph for a specific delivered opportunity while it is fresh. A working copy lasts between one and two hours. The permanent set is what an operator and a buyer actually look at. It survives indefinitely.
How the permanent set is assembled
For each pairing of one advertisement with one face, the platform keeps three slots, chosen by the local time of the screen at the moment of the ad play.
- Morning
-
06:00 to 10:00
- Noon
-
10:00 to 17:00
- Evening
-
17:00 to 06:00 the following morning
A face with no time zone recorded is treated as UTC.
Each slot is filled by the first qualifying photograph and is not overwritten afterwards. Once all three slots hold an image, further photographs for that advertisement and face are not kept. The set is therefore three photographs for the life of the pairing.
Who can view them
- Organization employees
-
Every employee role, including viewer, can open the photo captures of a campaign in the client cabinet, from the campaign’s own photo-captures tab. Auction campaigns and automated guaranteed campaigns each have one. Employees see only their own organization’s records; a viewer restricted to one legal entity sees only that entity’s faces.
- Platform administrator
-
The same records, for any organization on the instance.
- Demand partners
-
Over the SSP protocol, a demand partner can fetch the three permanent captures for its own creative across the faces it ran on, the photograph attached to one specific delivered opportunity, and the most recent working copy for a given face. Each permanent capture is returned together with a marker saying whether it was collected automatically or supplied by a person.
Replacing a capture
Any of the three slots can be replaced with a file of your choosing.
-
Open the campaign in the client cabinet and go to its photo-captures tab.
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Find the row for the face.
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Upload a replacement for the morning, noon or evening slot.
Owner, admin, manager and moderator can do this. Viewer cannot.
Three things happen to a replaced slot, and it is worth knowing all three before using the feature.
-
The change is written to the audit log as a before-and-after difference, attributed to the employee who made it — see Audit.
-
The slot is permanently marked as supplied by a person.
-
That marker is returned to the demand partner alongside the image.
A replacement is therefore visible to the buyer as well as to the operator. Use it to substitute a better photograph of the same delivery — a clearer frame, one without an obstruction — and expect the substitution to be apparent.
An empty slot can be filled the same way, and is marked person-supplied just as a replacement is. A slot can also be emptied, which leaves it marked person-supplied and available for the next automatic capture to fill.
| The three slots exist for each pairing of an advertisement and a face that has had at least one confirmed ad play. |