admin2 Sydny Merrill
AuthorThe Value of Photo Organizing Software
Excellent photo organizing software can bring great value to your company’s marketing team. An unorganized photo collection can become nightmarishly inefficient when searching for specific photos. Using photo management software can save hundreds of hours by providing the ability to create complex folder systems, add tags to photos, and use a search function to find the perfect image. Photo organizing software should empower the user or business to take control of their digital assets.
In this digital age, nearly everyone has access to a high-quality camera. Freelance photographers most often use professional cameras from brands like Nikon or Canon, while amateurs capturing memorable moments are generally using their iPhone and Andriod cameras. Amazingly 90% of all digital pictures last year were captured using mobile devices. According to Keypoint Intelligence, a leader in digital imaging, over 1.4 trillion images are expected to be taken in 2021. The number of digital pictures is expected to continue to grow every year, with 1.56 trillion projected for 2022. Over 7 trillion images are stored on hard drivers or cloud storage systems.
For amateurs and families, photography is about capturing life, but for professionals, photos have actual commercial value. Modern marketers rely on photography to enhance content and create a memorable impact. Pictures are worth a thousand words after all. Humans are visual beings, so articles with images engage readers for longer and garner significantly more views.
Below are some of the best photo organizing software options for managing large volumes of digital assets. The software that was selected all have the potential to immensely improve your companies photo organization, but there are many other valuable features to be found in each choice.
1. Filecamp’s Digital Asset Management
Filecamp’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) software promises to be an all-inclusive photo organizing application capable of easily and efficiently managing even the largest photo collections. Without proper organization, the full value of your digital assets cannot be realized.
Filecamp delivers professional cloud-based photo organizing software at an affordable price point. Filecamp’s Digital Asset Management software supports all major media types, including images, logos, videos, and documents. This DAM software especially shines for remote teams that require the ability to access digital assets from anywhere.
Customizable For Your Companies Needs
There are no scalability concerns with Filecamp’s DAM. All available plans allow for unlimited registered users. The software remains simplified while allowing trusted management to edit users’ permissions as needed. This provides added protection for your digital assets when working with contractors or freelance employees.
The entire digital asset library for your company is centralized and will be available to manage online. Filecamp includes branding features allowing the use of your company logo and a custom URL. Combined with the pleasing user interface, this creates an effective professional extension of your companies own website.
Tools and Features
Filecamp has an excellent array of tools and features that will improve your brand’s online management process. Google Drive and Dropbox are widely used for digital asset management (DAM) but have significant shortcomings. Dedicated DAM software provides creative marketing employees with a visual platform instead of rows of folders.
Proof Within Online Platform
Boost creative collaboration across departments and projects by using Filecamp’s online proofing features. Filecamp provides the ability for 24/7 edits and reviews from everyone involved in the project, including internal team members, the client, and other partners. Access is available from a web browser on both Windows and Mac systems. This can improve the client approval and project timeline considerably.
Tagging and Keywords
A photo you know is perfect for a project is useless if you can’t locate it, in a sea of thousands of photos. Vital to any worthy photo organizing software is the ability to efficiently add tags to images. Tagging images with the correct keywords greatly expedite the process when searching for specific images for a project.
Filecamp has gone a step further by implementing auto-tagging using artificial intelligence. The system will scan your images and recommend tags for review. Filecamp can also embed metadata into the digital assets to keep the associate tags when the asset is being transferred across different software and platforms.
Other Key Features
- Secure Filecamp servers using Google Cloud Platform and HTTPS protocol
- Create unique Labels for your companies workflow
- Avoid filesize limits and receive documents privately by using the Request Files feature
Pricing
All plans allow for unlimited licensed users.
- One-month free trial available with no credit card required
- Basic plan starts at $29 per month with 20GB of storage
- Advanced plan starts at $59 per month with 50GB of storage
- Professional plan starts at $89 per month with 100GB of storage
- Additional storage is available for purchase
2. Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is an incredible photo editing program, with a large fanbase. Adobe Lightroom is likely to be in the knowledgebase of your professional photographer or editor than other software, but expert training is included when purchasing licenses. While Adobe Lightroom is known more widely as a photo editor, Lightroom is software, driven by a database. Images imported into the software are easily cataloged and organized using keywords making it excellent photo organizing software. Adobe’s other flagship software, Photoshop, is solely an image editing and manipulation software.
Creative Cloud For Teams (or Enterprise)
Adobe Creative Cloud is the most likely way Adobe Lightroom would be integrated into a company’s software portfolio. By using the entire Creative Cloud suite, marketing and creative teams have access to over 20 Adobe applications. Adobe’s Creative Cloud has different plans and pricing depending on the size of your company and can service small and midsized companies, as well as large enterprises.
Licensed users can easily share work with other team members, clients, and vendors. Creative Cloud can also be integrated with popular projects and team management applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Adobe provides a very generous 1TB of cloud storage to each of your licensed team members.
While Adobe Lightroom is exclusively used for editing and organizing images, by using the Creative Cloud suite of applications, your company can use Adobe Spark, Adobe Dimension, Adobe InDesign, and the rest of the suite to fulfill other marketing needs. In this way, Adobe shines by offering photo organization, photo editing, collaboration tools, and other design applications.
Collaborate Using Libraries
Digital assets are stored on the user’s hard drive and are synchronized with the Creative Cloud platform. When collaboration is required among your team members, folders and libraries can be shared. Creative Cloud protects assets by locking libraries as read-only until editing rights and permissions are granted by the owner of the library. Libraries can be shared on-the-go by using the Creative Cloud website.
Collections and Sophisticated Tagging
Adobe Lightroom uses a Collections system as one of the major tools for organizing images. Users have two types of Collections available for implementation. Regular collections allow users to place any photos inside that collection. Smart collections differ because they are assigned rules or attributes, that all images must meet to be included in that Smart collection.
For example, a Smart collection created for only 5-star images, would not allow any lower-ranked images into the collection. Once a Smart collection is created and rules are assigned, Lightroom will auto-populate the collection with any images within the user’s inventory that fulfill the rules. This significantly saves time after importing photos.
Keyword tagging and especially using nested keywords is another great tool at your team’s disposal using Lightroom. By cataloging images within your companies photo library using keywords, all images with that keyword can be located quickly. Nesting keywords can create an even more impressive network of related images.
Pricing
Your company must buy enough licenses for each registered user. Licenses can be added later as needed.
- Adobe Lightroom is available at $9.99 per month per license
- Creative Cloud for Teams is available for $79.99 per month per license
3. Canto Digital Asset Management
Canto Digital Asset Management (DAM) offers a simple user-friendly solution for photo organization. Canto promises to empower your brand by providing comprehensive software tools designed specifically for use by teams and companies. It’s important for companies to properly organize their digital asset collection to be able to extract all the value stored. Canto supports many formats, including images, video, documents, and presentations.
Organization Features
Canto’s organization features are designed to be simple yet powerful. Folders and albums highly are customizable and can be structured to suit your business’s needs. Canto automatically sorts every uploaded asset into one of six smart albums, based on the file type. When a team member is searching for a particular asset type, this significantly reduces the time needed to find the perfect photo or the necessary presentation.
Canto DAM uses artificial intelligence for smart tagging and Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition technology to further optimize your collection. Digital assets can also be manually labeled based on any keyword or tag such as specific marketing campaigns or products.
The main interface allows for a quick search of digital assets using filters. There are a variety of filters available for users, including metadata, dates, and content type. Canto’s advanced search function also your team members to search using past search results, which can be incredibly useful when returning to a project.
Portals and Workspaces
Sharing content with specific users is easy with Canto’s Portals. Portals are customizable and can be branded to match your business. When collaborating with clients, freelancers, or remote team members, links can be used. All files shared within Canto can be edited to adjust image quality, as well as crop and zoom upon download.
Team members can develop on their hidden private Workspaces until content is ready for sharing with the companies Main library. Once work is submitted to the Main library, the work will be marked as ‘Pending’ or ‘Restricted’ for a few editors or administrators. At that point, work can either be marked ‘Approved’ or can receive comments.
Other Important Features
- Branding Canto is easy using customizable options for login screen and interface
- Option for automatic Watermarking upon uploading
- Uses highly secure AWS and surveillance and control systems
- Automatic copyright information extracted upon uploading
- Integrates with popular tools like LinkedIn, Adobe Illustrator, Google Drive, WordPress, and more
Pricing
- Canto provides custom quotes tailored to your companies needs
4. Brandfolder Digital Asset Management
Brandfolder aims to improve workflows among marketing teams and creatives with a strong photo organization software. Brandfolder markets their version of Digital Asset Management (DAM) software as ‘a home for all your branded assets’. Brandfolder created an intuitive interface while packing the platform with many powerful features.
Brandfolder has also developed its own proprietary artificial intelligence engine, to elevate your companies digital assets, by providing several ‘smart’ features and invaluable actionable insights. If your company is forward-thinking and looking to include more data analytics into the marketing process, Brandfolder may be an excellent choice.
Getting Assets Straightened Out
With Brandfolder’s organizing features, your team should spend significantly less time searching for photos. Use labels to assign a photo, video, or documents a specific identification that assists your team’s organization. Multiple labels can be used on one asset. If working on a specific marketing campaign, users can group all related assets into a single asset or attachment for easy management.
Brandfolder has well-developed auto-tagging features that can be edited and customized to your team’s needs. This tool has been improved using artificial intelligence, to automatically add relevant tags to digital assets, which may limit the need for manual tagging.
Brandfolder can support all necessary file types for your marketing and business needs.
Smart Rules Engine
The Smart Rules Engine allows administrators to create if/then logical statements that can automate asset management during upload. Depending on metadata and other criteria, new assets would automatically be cataloged into Collections, Sections, or Labels.
Bulk Asset Management
As a company grows larger, the need for bulk actions for a large quantity of assets increases. If the DAM relied on manual tools, this becomes unwieldy for teams to manage. Brandfolder can add or remove tags on many assets simultaneously without suffering software slowdowns.
Say goodbye to dragging and dropping small groups of photos at a time, to avoid crashing the program. Brandfolder can handle bulk merging and moving, allowing marketers to continually organize and reorganize assets as needed.
- Detect Duplicates
- Automatic metadata import and conversion into logical tags
- CSV Metasheets can be used to quickly change asset information in Excel and import it back into Brandfolder for instant reorganization
Other Standout Features
- Customize the platform by branding and choose the access URL
- Watermark and edit videos and photos from within Brandfolder
- Assets stored securely and backed up
- Powerful analytics available to improve marketing and creative campaign success
- Excellent customer service and training
Pricing
- Brandfolder provides custom quotes tailored to your companies needs
- Offer Premium and Enterprise plans
About the author: Sydny is a science enthusiast, often found struggling through web development tutorials, watching Netflix, and exploring her city. She creates freelance content around a variety of tech, science, and business topics.
