Cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive are shared services designed for storing and sharing files, with billions of users (Statista 2018). Cloud storage services can be accessed from any mobile device, tablet or computer. Cloud storage services also integrate with many other tools such as Zoom, Slack and Adobe, so you don’t have to navigate between multiple services. If cloud storage services are this convenient, what’s the point of having the right DAM solution?
At the heart of it all is metadata
With so many digital assets and the need to develop and manage them more effectively, discoverability is a key objective. Despite (and partly because of) the different services available, large amounts of time are spent searching for digital assets. Improving discoverability will speed up the processing of material and leave more time for productive work.
DAM uses metadata to categorise digital assets, allowing the user to distinguish one asset from another. Metadata is information that tells you what is in the object, or from a practical marketing perspective, where the image is shot and who or what is in it. You can also store other relevant information in the metadata, such as information about the copyright of the image. Once categorised, the metadata makes it easy to browse and quickly search in the DAM system.
Imagine you are preparing a publication and you need a picture of a child holding a flower. If you are using DAM, all you need to do is search for the keywords “child” and “flower” and the system will return the results that best match your search.
Let’s take another example; you have a particular image in mind that you want to include in a publication. You remember that the picture shows a dog in the woods, but you don’t remember which folder the picture is saved in. There are thousands of images, so searching for an image in a folder would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. With metadata, you can easily find the image, just type in the search terms “dog” and “forest” and DAM will provide you with the records that have dog and forest as meta tags.
WoodWing Assets – More efficient content production process
WoodWing Assets is a secure and scalable DAM solution that helps you organise and manage your digital assets and dramatically improve the discoverability of your content. WoodWing Assets was formerly known as Elvis DAM.
WoodWing Assets categorises digital assets using over 400 metadata fields, plus an unlimited number of custom metadata fields. You can augment image metadata with image recognition automation, and translate found keywords into different languages. Flag resources by status, access rights or time of use, and narrow your search to hide expired resources, for example.
Sharing your resources with external parties is easy; just gather the files you want in a single folder and give access to the folder to the person you want. As an administrator, you can manage access rights within your organisation as you wish, and define the level of rights each user has.
Thanks to its open interfaces, WoodWing Assets can always be integrated with your company’s technology solutions and scaled according to your business needs and growth. WoodWing Assets can be connected to your PIM system so that you always have up-to-date product information in the DAM and fresh product images in the PIM system. There are also a number of pre-built integrations available, including Photoshop and InDesign integrations, which allow you to edit images directly in the DAM. These integrations mean that you don’t need to switch tools between work steps, but can manage the whole process from within WoodWing Assets.
WoodWing Assets is available as a cloud service, a private cloud service or as an on-premise version.