Whether you are a professional photographer, an enthusiast or you just take the odd photo at a family event then it’s highly likely that at some point you have downloaded an image to a folder on computer, backed up an image to the cloud or shared a picture with a friend. Doing any of these things means you have performed some level of Digital Asset Management (or DAM as it’s known in the industry).
Most photographers are already familiar with resizing, cropping and editing photos. However, when it comes to managing your digital photos, it can be quite a daunting task. Identifying, organising, tagging and backing up becomes an extra overhead for a photographer. This is where a DAM solution like Asset Bank can help streamline the process.
What does Asset Bank offer a photographer?
Powerful metadata options:
Every digital camera, whether it’s a smart phone or a high-end DSLR, records EXIF data into its files. This data contains everything about the photo from the focal length of the lens, shutter speed and even location if enabled. Asset Bank can extract this metadata from your files and map it to custom attributes created by the admin user, allowing for highly configurable fields that can be pre-populated as users upload their photos. This allows a photographer to always have a record of the exact settings used to take that perfect shot or simply as a tool to help build searches within their Asset Bank.
Sharing with other users:
Sharing files is an easy task in Asset Bank and an invaluable tool for any photographer who may need to share large files with clients, agencies or other photographers. Files can be shared via email download links generated by Asset Bank or shared directly into Facebook. Users may also share a viewable lightbox of pictures (see below).
Lightboxes:
Lightboxes are a powerful feature in Asset Bank. By allowing users to group related assets into personal collections, they become an essential tool for photographers wanting to shortlist photos (perhaps from the same shoot or theme) into a set. These can then be downloaded or shared with other users via our published lightbox functionality. Published lightboxes are a great way to produce a microsite of images to showcase or share assets with others.
What else does Asset Bank offer?
Asset Bank has many other benefits that we just don’t have the time to list on this blog. Here are just a few more of our favourites:- Automatic watermarking of images - Protect your preview images with custom watermarks
- Powerful download options - Set dimensions and crop sizes automatically on download
- Slideshows and photo essays - Embed and share custom slideshows
- Duplicate file detection - Asset Bank automatically detects potential file duplicates
- Bulk updating of files - Update multiple assets easily
- Custom branding - Your Asset bank can be branded to match your business branding
- Fully content managed - Update text, links and page content with the click of a button
- Hero and featured images - Showcase high quality imagery throughout the application
- Mobile and tablet support - Full access to your Asset Bank ‘on the move’
- Asset versioning - Keep track of the changes you make to each asset
Conclusion
Out of the box Asset Bank offers many advantages to a photographer wanting to make the step up to a DAM system. Asset Bank's huge configuration options can be tailored to your needs and an early investment in DAM can save you time and money, giving you peace of mind as your files are safely and securely stored where you can access them anywhere online.
Still not sure whether you are ready for DAM? Then why not trial Asset Bank and see how it can help change the way you work with your files for the better.
