Where can an online image library be used?

Electronic images are used in almost every area of a business, and the benefits of bringing these images into a central location increase as the number of pictures increases.

Businesses need to manage digital images to make them useful. Assets such as corporate brochures, designs, images of products, photos of your staff and pictures supplied by agencies accumulate quickly - and in many different formats and resolutions. This creates a challenge for those managing the assets.

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Digital Asset Management

Counting the savings

Digital Asset Management is a common pressure point for businesses. According to GISTICS research, around $8,000 per head is spent every year on asset management activities such as searching, organising, backing up and protecting electronic images.

Creative professionals spend around 10% of their time on these tasks. Searching for digital assets takes up one third of this time. In a typical business, a creative person looks for a media asset or file 80 times a week and fails to find it 35% of the time. The GISTICS research ultimately shows that Digital Asset Management solutions will drop that figure to just 5%. Digital Asset Management can provide a huge improvement in efficiency, and a real reduction in cost.

Working more efficiently by design

There are further reasons to own and use a Digital Asset Management system. For example, formalising the process for retrieving images ensures brand consistency and means originators can qualify the context that pictures and assets can be used within. A file alone cannot do this if it arrives on a CD-ROM, but a Digital Asset Management system can log creator's notes in its database. When an image leaves the system, electronic audit trails provide accountability and eliminate duplication.

Using DAM implies using a workflow, and with that comes the ability to keep track and improve on how resources are used. DAM helps to build better collaborative environments, since it gives staff a simple means to share files over an extranet (for example, with clients and suppliers). Just that ability to provide works in progress safely encourages communication and better business relationships.