Digital Asset Management enables organisations to upload, manage and share digital media assets such as photographs, illustrations, audio and video. The digital media assets are assigned metadata and in some cases the metadata can be automatically captured on upload of the media item.
What are examples of digital assets?
A digital asset has no physical presence, instead they are files that are stored on devices, for example a local computer or a cloud-based storage network. Digital assets can be in the form of a photograph,illustration, audio or video and are easily copied and shared, therefore it is important to correctly manage your media to mitigate data breaches.
Why is digital asset management important?
- To manage and enforce organisation branding by making the approved logos and product images easily available.
- Provide a library or archive for bulk storage of digital assets.
- Production management systems for handling assets being created on the fly for use in live media production or as visual effects for use in gaming applications, TV, or films.
- Streaming for on-demand delivery of digital content to end users
How do you manage digital assets?
Here’s our top 5 tips to manage digital assets:
Organise your assets
Add tags, labels or categories to media items to group similar assets together. The marketing team are running a summer sale, they aren’t interested in photos of snowy mountains or cosy fireplaces all they want is photos in the summer category.
Make your content searchable
The easier your assets are to find the more likely your team will use them. Detailed and practical metadata enables media to be retrieved in a variety of ways including location, quality, dates and the list goes on. Media items have a significant metadata embedded in their file so when it can be extracted automatically it makes indexing even easier.
Manage your versions
Let’s say you cropped the trees out of an image, what happens when you need the image with those trees? This is why it is important to store earlier versions of a digital asset and allow those to be downloaded or reverted.
Apply Access control
Security controls ensure the relevant people have access to assets. For example your organisation is re-branding and wants to keep the original branding. End users shouldn’t have access to legacy branding so security controls should be implemented to avoid usage of the wrong media assets.
Retention management
Digital assets have a lifecycle, which includes various states such as creation, approval, live, archived and deleted. Keeping records too long wastes space and time so creating a schedule to maintain the digital asset lifecycle can benefit your organisation and if the process is automated, even better!
Discover how the Mediazel can centrally manage your images in an intuitive way.
Contact us today to organise a demonstration and subscription pricing.
