Digital Asset Management . . .

By Ron Rovtar
Managing Editor
June 14, 2005


“Digital asset management.”

It sounds as sexy as, well, any number of phrases computer folks coin for their great ideas -- pithy expressions like "universal client runtime,” “hypertext markup language,” “centrally controlled, standards-based environment,” or, that classic, “random access memory,” which could easily describe what you get from an eight-year-old explaining how all the chocolate chip cookies went missing.

Geeks don’t use cool features on their cell phones, they “deploy embedded rich content in a mobile ecosystem.”

Sheesh! It would give your high school english teacher a seizure if she didn’t know the technology behind such terms makes her life much easier. Who doesn’t understand that more “random access memory” (RAM) makes your computer work faster? And most people know this web page would be impossible without “hypertext markup language,” the simple web browser code we usually just call HTML.

So, if you are a harried creative professional, don’t glaze over next time someone bends your ear about “digital asset management.” Just think of it as “that great product (or service) my boss will love because it is finally going to get me so organized that I can do about 35 percent more work every week!”

Maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. How about: “that great product (or service) that will let me concentrate on being creative instead of spending a third my time looking for stuff."

That sounds better!

Digital asset management, DAM, if you will, is really nothing new. You manage your digital assets every time you put an image, text document, video clip or music file into a folder on your computer.

But today, you probably have many more “assets” than you had even a couple years ago. And, if you are like most creatives, your organizational needs have grown geometrically with this increase in materials and the demands of a fragmented communications industry that makes you produce several different designs or ads where one would have sufficed a few years ago.

Ask yourself how often you spend precious minutes looking for a file located on one of several disk drives, in some forgotten sub-folder, whose file name you can't remember anyway?

If you have ever shipped the wrong computer file to the printer, unintentionally sent a folder with two versions of a layout or, goodness forbid, let a volatile internal communication go external with bad results, then you probably need to think about digital asset management.

So listen up!

Several companies, including Adobe Systems, Capture, Ltd., and Getty Images have recently introduced products that can really simplify your life, help your company get materials to the right places at the right time and even help you locate, purchase, download and organize your stock and assignment image purchases.

( Editor's note: Corbis jumped into the digital asset management fray in late July with the acquisition of eMotion. The San Francisco-based eMotion provides, "a powerful and cost-effective technology platform for managing and distributing digital media assets," said Corbis. )

Prices range from “gee, it just came with the latest version of my graphics software” to hundreds of thousands of dollars for the top-of-the-line, big company version of Getty Images’ new product.

Let’s start at the bottom of the price scale and work up.

If you’ve updated to either version of Adobe CS2 or to the new Photoshop or InDesign programs, you already have a powerful, personal digital asset management tool. It is called “The Bridge.”

That’s right, The Bridge is a great DAM program, a fact all but lost in the hype about using it to download royalty-free images without opening your web browser.

“We’re trying to bring asset management right into your workflow,” said Adobe Senior Project Manager Bob Schaffel.

How? Well, let’s see.

First, The Bridge lets you review your image files without wasting time opening each separately -- a great help when you cannot remember the name of the file you want. With The Bridge, you can view reasonably-sized thumbnails, or even enlarged thumbnails, of every digital image on your hard drives. Similar features let you preview Quicktime movies or, get this, each individual page in a PDF document.

Second, The Bridge offers whole new ways to locate files. Suppose you forgot the name and location of a brochure design, but remember you used an obscure font called “DaddyOHip” ( yes there really is such a font ). You can have The Bridge search for and display all files containing “DaddyOHip." It probably won’t be many. Now that’s asset management for even the most disorganized among us.

Third, there’s “metadata,” another of those "geek" terms, for sure. Until now, metadata, especially when attached to an image, has been a royal pain in the you-know-where.

For the record, metadata is information about a file that goes with the file wherever the file goes. In the case of an image, you can attach metadata about the copyright owner, the licensing entity, the time of creation, all kinds of stuff, by simply using the Photoshop file menu and pulling down to “file info . . . .” You’ll get an extensive dialogue box that lets you enter the info.

Until now ( unless you used HindSight's StockView browser ), you had to open the image before adding or changing metadata, and, to make things worse, you could not transfer all the metadata from one image to similar images without cutting and pasting each field separately -- a real pain.

The Bridge solves these problems. It lets you work with the metadata of unopened files and move the information around to your heart’s content.

Also with The Bridge you can share files, limit access to files, learn what files are in use elsewhere and even drag images out of The Bridge and into applications like InDesign -- all without becoming much more disciplined than you already are.

Another recently unveiled DAM product called “Capture Desk” comes to us from “across the pond,” as they say in England. Capture, Ltd., claims this product, launched in May, is more of a workflow service than a digital asset management service. They’re splitting hairs. Anything that improves your “workflow” ( another wonderful computer-age term ) by helping you organize and work with “digital assets” is digital asset management.

Designed specifically for image researchers, Capture Desk is a web-based service that lets you search for, negotiate prices, purchase, download and organize stock ( and other ) images in a web space where you, clients, editors and others can gather to review images and collaborate on final choices.

“Capture Desk works with virtually all image suppliers ( there are a few odd exceptions ),” asserts Capture spokesman Robin Sundt. “Currently, the system works only with images and associated metadata, but later releases will incorporate other data formats.”

Prices range from roughly $200 to $350 a year, depending on how many images are stored in the system. The company offers a two-week free trial so users can get a feel for the system before paying. There is little software to download because the system works through conventional web browsers.

Finally, there are the two new Getty Images products -- one for heavy-hitters and one for mega-heavy-hitters.

If your company has at least 25 marketers who need to access digital assets in any of some 100 countries; if you must control which users can access what materials; if you use a combination of some 200 supported computer file types, and if you need functionality in several different languages in very different time zones 24 hours a day, seven days a week, then Getty Images Media Manager could be the product for you.

Getty Marketing Director Andrew Bloom thinks Getty can shine in this upper stratum because of everything the company has learned running a stock photo web site that displays 5.5 million pages a day while catering to 8.3 million visitors a month. He noted that Getty Images coordinates the work of 2,800 image and film producers, along with 50 content partners ( stock companies that supply images to the Getty web site ). He added that his company also manages images for Time-Life, Boeing, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association through other Getty programs.

Getty designed the program specifically for large marketing departments rather than publishers, said Bloom. But, even in marketing, the program won’t work for just anybody.

“You’ve got to be a pretty big company to see the value in this,” Bloom said. He estimated that firms with less than $250 million in assets would probably be uninterested.

However, “There are hundreds and hundreds of companies this size,” he asserted.

Bloom said the lower of two participation levels will cost a minimum of about $30,000 a year. The upper level starts at about $200,000 per year. So far, Getty Images has signed up two companies for the upper level -- General Motors and internet security giant Symantec.

Because GM needs to get images and other materials to local dealerships, Bloom said, Getty designed GM's system to handle 25,000 users. He said the whole service is web-based so users need nothing more sophisticated than a standard internet browser.

A second advantage to this web browser approach is that improvements automatically become available to users without the hassles of downloading additional software and without additions costs.

So, no matter what your budget, products on the market right now can help you get things done much quicker, often without even seriously changing your notoriously disorganized habits.

Damn! er, DAM, this really is a lot more interesting than it sounded like it was going to be!

                        


Adobe can be found at: http://www.adobe.com

Capture, Ltd. is at: http://www.capture.co.uk

Getty Images can be found at: http://www.gettyimages.com

HindSight, Ltd. is at: http://hsltd.us