Want to make your digital assets work for you? By managing your assets' metadata and sticking to standards, you can make locating them far quicker, easier and generally more workflow-efficient, leaving you more time to get on with being creative (or grabbing another coffee). Here we've broken down our top 5 ways to manage your metadata and keep on top of your digital assets.
From the moment you create an asset within your software, you need to make sure your associated metadata (document creation date, document page size, colour mode, resolution and more) or metadata from your camera (the date the image was taken, whether or not a flash was used, special aperture or exposure settings etc), is organised, stored and made available effectively. Here are a few of our essential starting points to managing metadata:
1. Work out how you work. Do you search by project, by job number, by client, or by any other metadata? Deciding on which descriptions and keywords are most important to how your team work, and making sure these are always added in the correct standard, will help make sure you're working more efficiently.
2. Use well-written descriptions. There's no use writing asset descriptions that only you can decipher - stick to simple but descriptive language that a general audience will be able to understand.
3. Keep consistent! We really can't stress how important it is to stick to standards. Develop and put in place a procedure for everyone to follow when adding metadata and keywords too, so you're all reading from the same page. It's good to have a house style on locations, times, dates, settings and more.
4. Use naming conventions. We wouldn't recommend adding keywords to the metadata of all your 'DSC_001.jpg' files - instead, use a DAM solution like Portfolio to batch rename files, keep your catalogue in shape and apply those naming conventions.
5. Try Digital Asset Management. If you are dealing with a large catalogue of assets, the best tip we can offer is to look into a Digital Asset Management solution. We use Extensis Portfolio to stay on top of our team's database of images and files, which gives you an easy-to-use visual interface for searching and managing assets. Whether you're in a small team or large business, there's a solution from Extensis Portfolio to fit your workflow.
Get in touch for more info on DAM and Extensis Portfolio... give us a call on 03332 409 306 or email sales@Jigsaw24.com. For all the latest news and tips, follow @WeAreJigsaw24 on Twitter or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.