Images play such a powerful role in telling your story and boosting your brand. Discover how the best online image management software can help you achieve maximum return on investment from your most valuable visual assets.
What is image management?
Day-to-day, you’re almost certainly relying on a large and growing collection of images to help represent your brand. The most obvious ones include things like photographs, stock images and logos. Especially with the growth of social media marketing however, other types of media files are being added to the visual mix: things like user-generated (as opposed to studio-quality) photography, screenshots, gifs and memes.
‘Image management’ refers to a system for storing, organizing, accessing and controlling these different types of images.
What is image management software?
Image management software refers to a tool designed to help you manage and govern your image library from a central location. So at its most basic, this type of software helps you bring together all the images you use into a single place, making it much easier to organize, search for and control the use of those assets.
In the real world however, images are just one type of material needed for promotions and campaign building. Yes they’re important; but so too are things like video, audio, animations, presentations, branding guidelines and a host of other files.
This is where digital asset management (DAM) comes in: a type of software that lets you manage ALL your digital content in a single location. If you want to give your team seamless access and keep control of all your brand-building elements side-by-side, it’s definitely worth considering a DAM platform that includes image management capabilities. (Tip: if you’re unfamiliar with digital asset management software and what it can do, read more here).
What are the benefits of online image management software?
More productive teams
With a back-catalog of thousands of images, often in multiple locations, team members can easily waste hours just trying to find what they need for a project. Image management software makes it much easier to organize, tag, annotate and flag up precisely what they need. For your team, it means much less time searching and more time on actually boosting your brand.
Extracting maximum value from each asset
Image production (especially studio time) doesn’t come cheap. And once a campaign is launched, the original image files can sometimes be forgotten about. Online image management software promotes the reuse, recyclability and repurposing of existing imagery. Notably, when launching a new project, you can much more easily check the suitability of what you have already, rather than automatically commissioning new work: good news for marketing budgets.
Promoting a consistent view of your brand
By providing a central hub for all imagery, online image management software makes it easy to delete or archive those items that are no longer relevant, or that no longer comply with updated guidelines. There’s much less chance of the wrong image popping up in a campaign, helping you maintain a consistent, compelling message.
Key features of image management software
For truly seamless management and support for a rapidly expanding image collection, it’s worth looking for a solution with the following capabilities (all of which are included in the BOOM Worksite):
- A central image library to store all content. A cloud-based system not only provides a reliable way of accessing images for branch office staff and home-based workers, but also ensures you can scale up your image library without the problem of running out of storage capacity.
- Fast image search. You can use tags to categorize and organize images. Meanwhile, employees can use filters to narrow search results and quickly isolate those images that are most relevant to their needs.
- Image sharing. Securely distribute images to the people who need them, along with the ability to configure custom permissions to restrict access where necessary.
- Batch conversions. Different web channels and sales platforms have their own technical requirements for image formatting. With BOOM’s worksite, you can convert large volumes of image files in batches, saving you a great deal of time.
- Tracking. Managers can track image uploads and downloads to keep an eye on who is using what images, for what purposes and how often.
Why is image management important?
For managers, image management software can help give you a much clearer understanding of how images are being used right across your brand. One way this can be particularly useful is in helping you identify the presence of under-used visual assets and encourage their usage. And when an image is deemed no longer useful, it can be instantly removed from your library, removing the risk of it being used in error.
Meanwhile, creatives have the benefit of a single source of truth: they can quickly get hold of the visual assets they need, safe in the knowledge that the images they are using are on-brand.
Can you integrate photo management software with editing software?
With Worksite, the answer to this is most definitely yes.
Alongside comprehensive image management capabilities, you also get the ability to customize photos and other visual assets on the fly, to repurpose, recycle and adapt them for whatever digital channel they are going to be used on.
Even better, the system comes with auto image resizing, so images can be optimized for your social media channel of choice (e.g. Instagram, Facebook or TikTok) in just a couple of clicks.
Find out more about managing photos and imagery online with BOOM
Designed for your visual assets, BOOM brings everything you need for extracting maximum value from images, including smarter management, more efficient production, easy editing, and stronger campaigns.
