Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Free-text searching provides a powerful tool for locating documents, but picture content
is much harder to identify unless individual images have been tagged appropriately.
There is no shortcut in this respect. However intelligent, software cannot tell if an image
depicts an oil rig in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico unless someone has attached
these keywords to it. With good indexing in place, DAM systems can create huge savings
and even generate new revenue streams for some organizations.
The software listed here ranges from inexpensive, single-user packages right up to systems
that cater to the needs of multinational enterprises.
Asset Bank
Vendor: Bright interactive
Purpose: High-performance DAM solution for corporate image management and ecommerce
Description
Asset Bank is a powerful solution to image management for corporations that need to
make all their digital assets easily available, whatever format they are in. It handles all
file types including images, videos, PDFs, and presentations, and provides an interface
that can be configured to suit the organization using it. One of its key features is a
sophisticated access rights structure, which gives a high degree of control over access
privileges to the stored data.
Users can preview short clips of video files as well as a thumbnail of the first frame. They
can also convert and resize image files before downloading them. Search facilities are
comprehensive, with full keyword search of text within documents, quick keyword
searching of the file structure, and view/search of the IPTC and Exif data. On the client
side, Asset Bank is browser-based, is compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s
Accessibility Guidelines, and has no need for plug-ins or JavaScript.
On the administration side, Asset Bank offers some important features: reports and statistics
to show how people have been using the system, whether or not their searches
have been successful, and a list of their chosen keywords.
For companies that want to sell images online, Asset Bank can be integrated with the
vendor’s ecommerce system that allows you to use payment providers such as WorldPay
or PayPal. It lets you configure the interface with the customer, for currency, tax, and
the permitted period between payments and download. You can also integrate Asset
Bank with a content management system (CMS) such as Interwoven, Rhythmyx,
Documentum, or the vendor’s own EccoCMS. (A CMS enables updating of Web
content without disturbing the basic structure of the site.)