I spoke to a bunch of desperate wanna-be-covereds who had very, very old software, software that hadn't been updated since the Windows 2000 days (seriously). There was another odd discovery about the image management software world: apparently it's kind of hard to compete in a world where there is Adobe. Me? I just wanted a way to hold half a million images and get at them quickly.
Think of Coca Cola sharing TV commercial production assets with its thousand different ad agencies and you get the idea. These are meant for very large agencies and clients to do things like share their resources. Then there is that class of enterprise products called Digital Asset Management (or DAM) products. I had the enjoyable experience of testing out even more products, only to find they failed completely on. png, but screw up its signature feature - transparency - in order to store the data. There's another gotcha, and that's that one of the main file formats for the Web. I can't tell you how many helpful press representatives and marketing droids from image management product companies contacted me, insisted their products would work, only to be shot down because they couldn't handle illustrations. Vector graphics aren't made up of bits, they're made up of math describing lines and fills, and they're used in creating illustrations, logos, diagrams, and the like.Īctually, I ran into a metric ton of barriers, idiocy, firm insistence, and lack of usefulness. The biggest is that photo organizers (which comprise everything from Adobe Lightroom on down) don't handle vector graphics like.
Oh, and it would be nice to have this on a network, so I could easily do my work either at my desk or on my laptop.īack then, I ran into a number of barriers.And I wanted that system to allow relatively easy drag-and-drop from the desktop to the application so I could get content in and out of the system while composing presentations, without losing track of the flow of the actual lesson I was preparing.I wanted that database to hold all my media asset files (both vector and bitmap).I wanted to have a database-based organizer, so that searches would be fast and all the files wouldn't have to be scanned for each search.To speed up today's read, let me grab the problem statement from that article and reproduce it here: That's why I need a media asset management tool. I've licensed hundreds of thousands of images, and I'm always still looking for more. To push my presentation production values to the level necessary, I need to use a tremendous number of images. I spend weeks at a time living in Windows PowerPoint 2013 (on a Mac, surprisingly enough). I do a lot (a way LOT) of very high-end PowerPoint presentations. If you'd like to see what happens when a grown man rants about file formats, read my infuriatingly unsuccessful quest for a good media asset management tool. NeoFinder keeps track of your documents, photos, songs, movies, and folders wherever they are stored.Įven so, back in 2013, I gave up for a time on finding a good media asset management tool. 41 impressive questions to ask in a job interviewĬatalogs your entire disk and media library, and backup archive.