One capture pipeline: from turntable rotation to live catalog listing

Most dealers touch the same stone four times: shoot video on phone, pull stills for WhatsApp, re-type specs into Excel, paste again into a website or PDF catalog. Every handoff is a chance to lose carat weight, treatment notes, or the right thumbnail.

The pipeline I build starts at the turntable and ends with a live listing - one ingest, one source of truth.

What one rotation produces

• Video: Compressed MP4/WebM for the catalog and inquiry pages.
• Stills: Eight frames at fixed intervals for social, email, and fallback images.
• 360° set: 36 frames for drag-to-spin viewers where needed.
• Metadata: Carat, dimensions, treatment, origin, and internal SKU tied to the same stem.

File names follow the stone stem - blue-sapphire-2-35cts.mp4 pairs with blue-sapphire-2-35cts-slice-01.jpg and the JSON row. No orphan assets.

JSON inventory as the hub

The catalog reads from a single JSON inventory file. When a new stone is captured, the ingest script appends or updates one row: slug, category, pricing flags, sold state, image paths, description. The site rebuilds or hot-reloads from that file.

Dealers keep Excel for internal pricing if they want - but the public catalog doesn't duplicate typing. Export tools can sync from JSON back to spreadsheet for office staff who still live in columns.

Why this beats marketplace listings

Third-party platforms want their own photo specs, their own categories, their own commission. A owned pipeline means you control compression, 360°, inquiry routing, and domain SEO. One capture session feeds your site, your WhatsApp stills, and your export PDFs without reformatting for someone else's template.

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Want a capture-to-catalog pipeline scoped to your inventory? Get in touch.