Digital Asset Management for Photographers: Where to Start
Where to start with photography digital asset management (DAM)? Most photographers and studio teams have at some time or other stared into a Mac or asset library with eyes glazed, asking this question.
It all starts so promisingly. One day you’re naming your first few files. The next you’re having blood-pressure spikes caused by the cryptically-named jungle of folders in front of you.
How did it come to this? The dawning realization hits you that it’s time to start getting a grip with smarter digital asset management.
Digital Asset Management for Photographers: Why Is It so Complicated?
Photography digital asset management starts the moment you click the shutter. From that moment, there are countless steps before your beautifully re-touched assets are fit for purpose.
Why the organized chaos of your asset library eventually just becomes chaos
When you’re at a shoot getting snap-happy with whatever it is you’re paid to snap, you’re in the zone.
Meanwhile, your SD card is getting hit with dozens of photos that soon turn into hundreds. Back at the studio, you fire-up Adobe Photoshop and hunker down to some serious editing:
- Filters and touch-ups
- Cropping and aspect ratio
- Maybe manual tweaks if you’re feeling really OCD
As you get creative and obsess over filters, 100s of original photos turn into countless copies to discard, keep, rename and manage.
Not only does it cost time and hard work, the creative energy you spend leaves little in the tank for organizing and managing digital assets.
Why digital asset management is so hard
Ultimately, actually managing digital assets loses out to the priority of creating, editing and delivering great work.
You tell yourself “I’ll organize all these files later.” Often, that “later” never comes; your next shoot rolls in and your asset library takes another big hit.
The result is what you like to call ‘organized chaos’ that you learn to live with.
Managing folders and files is just the start
Once you add a collaborative layer to managing digital assets, things get worse. Just the time it takes to send files back and forth seriously limits your ability to scale work.
Approval requests, uploads, downloads, collaborator communication, samples for potential prospects; it goes on and on.
Time for a DAM reality check
The truth is that it really doesn’t have to be such hard work and there are antidotes to the chaos.
We don’t mean simply tidying folders and naming files strategically. No matter how diligently named, asset libraries eventually succumb to the creeping chaos. Finding smarter antidotes can be the difference between growth and stagnation.
How to Bring Order to the Chaos of Manual Digital Asset Management
Here are some good places to start if you’re serious about scaling your workflow, winning bigger clients and minimizing the grunt work.
Stop relying on email for digital asset management workflows
Email is an essential tool. We’re not telling you to switch to smoke signals. But we are telling you to think about how you’re using email. Log into your inbox once you’re done here and get auditing.
How much time do you spend searching attachments and deciding which emails actually need your attention? All that time builds up and keeps you off of more productive ‘to-do’ items.
Streamline your DAM tech stack
If you’ve already stopped relying on manual backups, then perfect. Maybe you’re using Google Drive or Dropbox. It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. especially if you want to reduce redundancy in your workflows.
Globaledit makes other cloud storage spaces almost redundant. Most of your workflow lives in one place, reducing countless moving parts into a simple integrated workflow.
Maybe It’s Time to Switch to Dedicated Digital Asset Management Software (That Makes You Look the Part)
Here’s the bottom line.
As a studio or photographer, it’s painful to live with the day-to-day knowledge that you could be spending your time more efficiently on growth. That’s why you’re reading this.
The punchline is that you’ve probably lived with this uncomfortable truth longer than you like to admit to yourself.
Until you take a big step forward, the feeling that you could have grown better these past 12 months will linger like a bad client.
Dedicated DAM software holds the key to unlock all of that uncaptured growth. Why? At the most basic level, it helps increase efficiency while decreasing cost. Not to mention all the digital asset security, collaboration, access control and versioning perks.
Start with a DAM demo. Trust us, you won’t look back
Just ask. We’ll show you how globaledit’s digital asset management software for photographers and studios integrates with Adobe Photoshop.
We’ll also show you how to search, track and securely store assets. All while collaborating with other people using on-platform communication and approval.
No time-consuming uploads and downloads. No back and forth communication and delays. Just beautiful, powerful simplicity.