Why Is Workflow Automation Important for Photo Studios?
Be it for an ecommerce store or a company’s social media, the importance and demand of visual content are increasing exponentially. In 2020, the majority of content marketers said that more than 90% of their content included visuals. This is no surprise since visuals like images and videos play an integral role in driving sales and capturing attention.
However, the increasing demand creates equal challenges like efficiently producing a high volume of assets at a low cost. This is where workflow automation comes in.
Automation solutions for photography studios optimize every aspect of production and make it scalable, cost-efficient, and streamlined. You can save up to 30% of yearly revenue with an efficient workflow.
Importance of Workflow Automation for Photography Studios
Instead of spending days perfecting a shoot, automation can help you wrap it up in minutes. This turnaround time is significant when you’re dealing with a large volume of assets. The faster you create photos, the faster it can hit the market, which means you are making the asset profitable sooner.
As a result, photography studios are shifting towards creative workflow management to handle their everyday projects. Here are some important benefits of automating your workflow:
Keep a Track of Clients
It can get overwhelming to manage the records of multiple projects with various clients at the same time. A creative workflow management software can relieve you from this pressing issue by taking care of the admin tasks. Most DAM solutions will have a dashboard that shows the active jobs and the progress of the work for all your clients at one glance.
You can pace up your projects in accordance with the deadlines. For example, you can create workspaces and collections per client in a DAM solution like globaledit. This ensures you have all the assets in one place without the risk of losing an important file.
Organize Information
Creative workflow management software and enriched metadata allow you to find assets exactly when you need them. Sorting can be automated based on rules of metadata and other tags.
You can easily organize files by the date of their creation, edited date, asset information, and the like. This allows you to retrieve the information you want just when you need it.
Create Consistency
Automation provides the opportunity to create repeatable templates. From angles and lighting to camera settings and edits, you can store templates for different types of shoot. This eliminates human error, ensuring consistency in shoots of a certain type.
Not only this, by having a bird’s eye view of all the assets and visual language, you can maintain brand consistency. For example, Amazon has set standards for product images where product photographs must have a white background with 85% of the product appearing in the image. On the other hand, eBay allows a light grey background.
Similarly, image requirements can vary from client to client, and having a depository to maintain the records will make the task much easier.
Manage Revisions and Approvals
One of the key issues faced by photo studios is being able to manage edits. How do you avoid confusion and know exactly what to change?
This is where a creative workflow management software significantly helps you. For example, Markup Editor allows you to add annotations directly on your assets. You can use the brush tool to highlight a section and include comments to minimize any potential confusion.
Automation solutions like file Versioning significantly ease the post-production tasks. You can maintain a record of iterations of an asset, allowing you to compare different versions side-by-side with their own comments, ratings, and markups.
Once you have a set of assets reviewed and edited, “Image Approval Gallery makes it easier to “kill” or “approve” assets and stay in constant touch with your creatives.
Create Rich Content
With increasing competition, high-quality images are non-negotiables to drive sales. But you can take it up a notch by including rich content like 360-degree images, which show a boost in conversions by nearly 47%.
But the creation of such images is costly and time-consuming with traditional photography. With automation solutions like camera integration with motorized rigs, the output time can be as low as three minutes, making the production faster than ever.
Promote Creativity
Research shows employees spend up to 16 hours per week on admin tasks that could be automated. That’s two full working days.
As the repetitive admin tasks get automated, extra time and energy can be channeled towards exploring creativity. This includes more A/B tests or trying out different methods for the shoot.
For example, you save a lot of time with the help of features like Sync that lets you upload assets during the production, as you create them. Not only that, you can customize file extensions as you import them—think about all the time saved in separating raw files from the processed ones.
Above all, workflow automation makes operations simpler and easier to access for all. It helps meet deadlines by cutting production time and creating consistent results.
Ready to automate your workflow and make your production more efficient? Request a demo with us to learn how we can help.