Some companies spend thousands of dollars per year trying to manage their digital assets.

Take the mobile communications Motorola as an case. It used to take employees xx minutes on average to find, convert, and deliver each paradigm they used. To save time and money, Motorola adopted a digital asset management (DAM) system. This has made it easier and faster to manage their digital assets, and saved them $600,000 in headcount cost every bit a result.

Your company tin can likewise save thousands of dollars and hours of manpower with a DAM system. DAM systems help you store, organize, find, distribute, analyze, and overall manage your digital content better. Having such a system in place can forestall salespeople and other stakeholders from using outdated artistic content, permit designers to spend fourth dimension creating avails instead of tracking them downward, and solve other hurting points.

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In this post, nosotros'll cover everything y'all need to know most digital asset management, including:

  • What DAM is
    • Why it'south important
    • What video DAM is
  • The best gratis open source DAM software
  • The best premium DAM software

What is digital nugget management?

Digital asset management (DAM) is the process of storing, organizing, securing, and sharing digital assets throughout a company. This includes everything from photos to videos, audio files, animations, interactive ads, and more.

DAM software is a technology that tin automate or simplify this procedure and provide a multitude of benefits for your company. DAM software non only stores digital assets in a central location — it also automates workflows and tasks like watermarking images, provides sophisticated search capabilities for locating media files, and manages permissions and other security protocols.

Allow'due south take a closer look at the benefits of DAM below.

Why Digital Asset Direction Is Important

In that location are endless reasons digital nugget direction is important. Below we'll focus on three of the biggest benefits.

Increased Productivity

Digital avails tin be used past many teams across your company — your sales, marketing, and customer service teams are just a few. With a DAM, these teams don't have to request avails from your designers. Teams tin can access these avails from 1 centralized location, while designers tin focus on creating more. This helps boost productivity and efficiency across your company.

Brand Consistency

Your brand is made up of several core assets, including your logo, colour palette, and typography. If employees tin't notice these assets, and so they may resort to using outdated versions of these assets or the wrong ones. This can weaken your make identity. With a DAM, you can keep all your core and upward-to-date avails in one place to ensure all internal teams (and external folks like partners, affiliates, agencies, and clients) will accept admission to the correct files.

Security

Without a DAM, employees might save and share digital assets over e-mail, Slack, or even text or in Google Drive, Dropbox, or maybe all of the in a higher place. With these avails floating around in then many dissimilar places, it's extremely difficult to keep them secure and ensure they're but accessible to approved users. A DAM solves these problems. By but placing files in a centralized location, you can gear up up permissions and guidelines to command who has admission to them and how to use them.

Video Digital Asset Direction

When yous hear digital asset management, you might retrieve of images and logos beginning — but videos are incredibly of import assets.

In fact, 83% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads. They likewise say video has helped with acquiring customers, engaging social media audiences, and increasing understanding of their products and services, and more.

Video digital asset management is a blazon of software designed to help companies scale their production of high quality and on-brand video avails, and distribute them across channels. With this blazon of software, yous can do one or more of the post-obit:

  • Create templates with make elements like logos to ensure consistency across teams
  • Localize videos to dissimilar markets and languages
  • Create variations to test and optimize your videos for different advertizement platforms and customer segments
  • Quickly resize video assets to fit different online and social media ad formats

These are just a few benefits that video digital direction software offers.

Nigh DAM systems include the video creation and modification tools you lot demand to chop-chop create and update high-quality videos. These video assets are then stored in a central library along with your other digital assets so they can be easily retrieved, shared, and distributed beyond content channels.

The DAM organisation Bynder, for case, is integrated with Video Brand Studio. This tool simplifies every step in the video content lifecycle, from cosmos to distribution. For example, Video Make Studio allows users to create video templates using approved clips and other brand assets, and then automatically distributes videos direct to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Now that nosotros have a amend agreement of what digital and — more specifically — video asset management is and why both are important, allow's take a await at some free and premium software options.

Complimentary Open Source Digital Asset Management Software

Open source digital asset management software is ever gratis — or at least offers a free program for users. While it lacks some functionality and flexibility that premium alternatives offer, it'south a great way for freelancers and small-scale teams to get organized and streamline their creation and distribution processes. Let's check out some of the best options.

1. ResourceSpace

landing page of opensource digitial asset management Resourcespace

ResourceSpace is an first-class option for universities, nonprofits, and other companies that want to adopt a digital asset management system while keeping their costs low. The free plan for this open up source DAM arrangement has no limit on the number of users — only there is a limit of 100GB free storage.

ResourceSpace offers many features for simplifying how you upload, organize, and access files, including AI automated tagging, user permissions, search tools, version command tools, and an analytics office.

two. Pimcore

landing page of proprietary digital asset management software Brandfolder

Used by more 100,000 companies worldwide including Pepsi, Sony, and Audi, Pimcore is open up source DAM software that enables companies to integrate, consolidate, organize, shop, reuse, and manage any type or amount of digital assets. Its Customs edition offers unlimited data, integrations, and users for free.

3. Pics.io

landing page of opensource digitial asset management Pics.io

Pics.io is an ideal DAM system for individuals who are already paying for Google Drive storage. Pics.io lets you lot create and maintain an piece of cake-to-use, centralized digital library for your assets on tiptop of your deject storage. However, yous are limited to a maximum number of 50 thousands assets in the library on Pics.io's costless program and calculation user accounts will cost you.

On this free tier, you lot tin detect files by type, content, filename, keywords, and more thanks to Pics.io's advanced search features. You can also publish and share media files individually or in bulk, and create set-made templates to utilize for future projects equally well.

Premium Digital Asset Management Software

Proprietary digital asset direction software tends to be expensive — but it'southward also more characteristic-rich and easier to implement than its open source alternatives. Proprietary DAM software as well typically comes with robust customer back up. If you accept some budget to spend, then you'll be ameliorate off with one of the premium options below.

i. Brandfolder

landing page of proprietary digital asset management software Brandfolder

Brandfolder is one of the highest-rated digital asset direction platforms that's used by enterprise companies like Slack and Lyft.  One of its best features is Brand Intelligence, which uses a combination of proprietary AI and automobile learning technologies to bear witness who is using your assets, where they're being used, and which are the highest-performing.This proprietary AI engine besides automatically adds tags when files are uploaded, recommends tags, prevents duplicate uploads, and translates video sound into text for even more advanced search functionality.

Brandfolder likewise offers easy bulk uploading with drag and drop support, bulk editing tools, avant-garde video editing, templating, user management features, and more.

2. Adobe Experience Manager

landing page of proprietary digital asset management software Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is another enterprise solution for companies who need to deliver content across multiple digital channels. With automation, smart tools, electronic forms, programmer tools, and deject hosting, it offers the combined power of a digital asset management system and a content management system.

AEM allows you to create and re-employ digital avails — called "Experience fragments" — across unlike channels and devices. Since they tin exist used with AEM'due south data integrations and advanced targeting and customization features, Experience fragments will enable your teams to streamline content creation and deliver tailored experiences to your visitors wherever they are on your site.

The biggest problem is the price tag. With costs up to ane million dollars per yr, some companies may be improve off with an AEM alternative.

three. Canto

landing page of proprietary digital asset management software Canto

Canto allows companies to download, store, and share assets from a primal branded environment, search for brand avails with custom metadata fields, and secure and brand their content consistently thanks to permission-based access and branded portals. What sets information technology apart from other enterprise solutions is its easy-to-use visual interface with features like automatic file organization, watermarking, and copyright license management to simplify team collaboration.

4. Bynder

landing page of proprietary digital asset management software Bynder

Leveraging AWS global services for scalability and performance, Bynder is used past big brands like Puma, Spotify, TED, and 5 Guys. It provides the integrated solution Video Brand Studio, which enables companies to create, adapt, manage, distribute, and analyze video assets faster.

Another characteristic that sets this proprietary software apart is its templating. Information technology offers Digital and Print Brand Templates to make information technology easier and faster to create more on-brand content. Bynder is able to transform creative files from Photoshop and Sketch into reusable digital templates. Information technology also provides print templates and so anyone — not simply your designers —can create content that meets your brand guidelines.

Taking Control of Your Digital Assets

Since DAM systems assist you lot store, organize, detect, distribute, analyze, and overall manage your digital content better, using DAM software can salve your company thousands of dollars and hours of manpower. Using any of the open source or proprietary software mentioned above can assist your visitor reduce friction as information technology scales.

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Originally published April 5, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated April 05 2021