Images have become essential for organisations in almost every sector. But because they’re used for such a wide range of purposes – logos, illustrations, product photos, advertising, social media, email, print marketing – it’s only natural that these images start to stack up.
What began as a simple folder for images you’ve purchased or created, soon becomes an overflowing lake of unorganised assets. That’s not ideal if you want to reuse these assets (like most businesses do), as it could take hours to find what you’re looking for – that’s if you find the right image at all.
The result? Constantly spending more time and money on new images, when you could be reusing the assets you already own. In this post, we’ll look at some tips that can help you organise your images to get the most out of them time and again.
First of all, make sure you have a good digital asset management (DAM) system at your disposal. Most of the tips we’ll discuss in this post will be based on the features and facilities which DAM can offer. While it will cost more than a basic cloud storage facility, it will more than pay for itself in the time it saves and the value it adds to your assets.
While assets are searchable in other ways (more on this below), every asset management system needs a structure. This will make browsing easier if users don’t have a specific asset in mind, but it can be used as a backup if your keyword searches don’t work.
Create a folder structure that works based on your assets and how you use them. There could be folders for different products or product categories, what’s in the image (people, products, locations), or what the image is for (packaging, branding, emails, social media).
Here’s where DAM comes into its own. Images can be tagged with keywords, which can then be used to search your system and retrieve the right assets. As above, these should be based on how you use your images – and how you will search for them in future.
Some ideas include their purpose, focal points, main colours and any products or services they’re related to. What’s important here is that you set standards to keep keywords consistent. You don’t want to be searching for a ‘sofa’ when the image you’re looking for is tagged as a ‘couch’ for example.
The final tip concerns all the different versions of your images. That could be previous drafts which have since been tweaked and polished, or different resolutions for use on various channels. With the wrong system, you might have to save all of these separately, which can cause issues with retrieval, lost files and access to different versions.
However, thanks to DAM, you can link all of the different versions of a file, so users can choose which they need to view, edit or download. These can be made available to users according to their level of access, so you needn’t worry – for example – about a client accessing an unfinished version of their product.
iBase is a feature rich DAM system that can help you organise your images for quick and easy retrieval, editing and sharing. If you’d like to find out more about how our software can help you, feel free to contact our team for a one-to-one demonstration.
