Digital asset management: It’s a visual world

Companies vary in maturity in their use of digital asset management. “In some cases, a company wants to get its digital house in order first, by moving all its digital assets into a centralized system,” Sedegah says. “In other cases, the company has bigger ambitions and wants to connect their digital assets to a full experience management strategy that can not only manage the assets, but also deliver seamlessly to every digital touchpoint.” Either way, AEM provides a means to make a smooth transition from management to delivery.

PICTURE THIS

Individuals and corporations are capturing more photos than ever before. In 2015, Americans alone will take an estimated 105 billion pictures, about half of them with smartphones. But most consumers and many corporations will readily admit that they lack a good strategy for storing and retrieving them. ACDSee from ACD Systems International was an early entrant into the field of photo management, with a community-based shareware product developed more than 20 years ago. At the time, a specialized tool was essential for viewing, because Windows 95 did not have a native JPG viewer.

ACD Systems now offers a full line of consumer and enterprise products for organizing and editing photos. “Our products are known for their speed, which results from our algorithm for fast decoding,” says Frank Lin, CTO of ACD Systems. “ACDSee keeps track of various resolutions of each image, can re-render them on the fly and of course search by keyword.”

ACDSee 365 is the company’s recently introduced subscription-based cloud solution, which is accessed through a browser. The on-premise software products use a Windows desktop interface. “Our digital imaging editing and processing capabilities are very strong,” Lin adds. “We support many varieties of digital SLR cameras, all of which have proprietary raw formats containing unprocessed data.” Rule-based workflow capabilities allow users to automatically rename, rotate, convert or process a set of editing steps repeatedly. The software also includes integrated maps that work with geo-tagging.

Upcoming enhancements include the ability to do pixel targeting so that just certain colors can be sharpened, or exposure to just one color can be adjusted. Backlighting problems will be resolvable with one click. Support for touch-screens is also being added, and a collaborative version of the product line is in the works that will allow creation of different groups with access privileges.