The Digital Asset Management (DAM) is successfully implemented, the assets are transferred, and the users are trained. You are now expecting the DAM to run and harvest the promised key business benefits from such a tool.
This is where the last part of the comspace guest post series begins. In reality, one or several employees are almost exclusively occupied for a long time with manual tagging and categorization of existing assets. In case of an international company, the metadata needs to be translated as well.
Why is this necessary? If the assets are not consistently and precisely tagged and categorized, then a high-performance search in the DAM is not possible. The anticipated simplification of daily work does not take place.
Essential Tagging and Categorization of Images
In most organizations, huge volumes of images constitute the bulk of the assets residing in the DAM. These often do not have a descriptive name, but are stored under titles such as 2023948_201365.png or DSC_9001.jpg. How is the DAM supposed to know which images fit, for example, the product category “garden shears” and for which search query should they pop up?
A powerful search is only possible with tags
Without appropriate tags, images get lost in the virtual vastness of the DAM and are very difficult to find. This is especially true, when data volumes increase dramatically and many people use the system.
However, manually tagging images cannot be the solution. Tagging a single image can already take several minutes. Who is going to do this tedious work, especially since most companies upload large volumes of new images regularly?
Some DAM systems make the work easier by providing a clear capture dialog or bulk tagging of several assets at the same time, but only automatic solutions provide a real remedy.
Automatic tagging solution
One of these solutions is our automatic image recognition tool, Autotagger. It is based on the AI solution Imagga and handles the automatic tagging and categorization of huge amounts of images in a very short time.
AI dramatically speeds up tagging and categorization
Custom training thanks to learning AI
Autotagger can assign many images to suitable keywords and categories by default. When it comes to industry- or company-specific product images, the AI can be trained on new tags and categories in a custom training session. The Autotagger then is also able to recognize the W 6413 drill or the CV312 connector.
Metadata maintenance in multiple languages
Your assets need to be used on international websites or in stores, but the metadata and tags are only available in German? Then the employees in the foreign country or foreign sales companies cannot use the DAM adequately, because the internal search for tags will not be successful.
In most companies, translating metadata into different languages is a time-consuming and error-prone process that involves exporting metadata from the DAM, passing it on to a translation agency, and then importing the translated version back into the DAM.
With an automated translation solution such workflows are drastically shortened. Our integration solution for the DeepL translation software is suitable for this purpose. DeepL is one of the best machine translation technologies currently available. Its high quality is based on artificial neural networks that understand words in their context instead of translating them individually.
In addition, the DeepL service is 100 percent DSGVO-compliant. Texts are deleted after translation. With the DeepL integration into CELUM Digital Asset Management, editors can have automatic translations performed in 49 language combinations. This can be done after manually selecting specific assets or asset folders, or automatically when importing new assets.
This means significant time savings for editors, while maintaining very high translation quality and minimizing errors. In addition, the costs for a translation agency are saved.
A DAM implementation is work – but it’s worth it!
- integration with key systems is missing or does not work,
- no satisfactory solution has been found for tagging,
- change communication has been neglected.
We have had good experience with repeatedly pointing out these issues before and during projects and providing support when needed. Some things can be solved excellently technically, for others only experience, empathy and clear communication can help. But once the hurdles presented here are overcome, a good DAM is a powerful friend for any organization.
You can learn more about how to overcome the hurdle of integrating a DAM system into the existing IT infrastructure in the first part of this blog post series. The second part is about how you, as a project manager, can ensure acceptance within the company.
Are you facing any of these hurdles? Or have you already mastered them? In any case, we look forward to learning about your experience and answering any questions. Contact us, we look forward to hearing from you!
