If you've been working at home with young kids around during these “corona days”, you might have intuitively expected the last word of the title above to be "Toys" or "Candy" 😜. However, if you're a member of a creative team for a web site or software application, then you know how essential it is to have simple ways to share and collaborate on pre-production media assets.
Likewise, there's huge value in having a way to easily update and publish final digital visual content, such as brand identity images, event photos, or product/service photo galleries, directly from the DAM system you work with every day.
Today, Cloudinary is happy to present the latest two additions to its growing set of DAM collaboration features:
- Visual collection sharing is a one-click method of sharing the pre-production images and videos from a single collection with selected stakeholders.
- A Media portal enables you to easily publish finalized media content that can be shared at the click of a button, enabling you to distribute selected assets to people outside your organization without exposing your entire asset library and with no need for a special login. The Media portal can be a great way to create a quick and easy brand portal, press media kit, product or service gallery, event photo site, and more.
Both of these are delivered in the form of automatically generated responsive web pages, complete with super-intuitive navigation, preview, and download, along with on-the fly updates as you add, rename, or remove assets from the collections you choose to share. And both take advantage of Cloudinary's dynamic DAM platform, which ensures a single source of truth across all teams, from photographers and graphic artists, creative and marketing teams, and through to the developers who will ultimately deliver these images and videos in your public websites and mobile apps.
The end-user interface is quite similar in both of these new collaboration features. However, the purpose and use-cases for shared visual collections and the media portal are quite different.
Shared Visual Collections
The workflow from media creation to approval can involve many stakeholders from both inside and outside your organization. Finding ways to work remotely, and still work productively together is paramount. Sharing files via emails, zip files, etc. may result in multiple different versions floating around, leading to inefficiencies, confusion, misunderstandings, and possibly even mistakes in production.
Cloudinary initially added Collections primarily for sharing with other DAM users, including sharing with users at various permission levels, the option to include the same assets in multiple collections, commenting on assets, user tagging, and more.
Now we've taken our collections to a new level with visual collection sharing. Just click the Share button on a collection you created or one where you have owner-level permissions, and select to generate a webpage link. In seconds, you have an automatically generated web page that you can share with the relevant stakeholders.
Whenever any image or video is added, removed, renamed, or replaced with new versions, the shared collection webpage is automatically updated (upon refresh), ensuring that the Cloudinary DAM remains the single source of truth for all your media assets both inside and outside your organization.
Stakeholders who receive the link can drilldown to view a large preview of each asset, easily navigate between them, download individual files or download the entire collection.
Media portal
While shared collections are great for discussing, reviewing and making decisions on assets in preparation for their 'big day', The Cloudinary Media Portal provides a platform for super-easily sharing your approved/final images and videos from multiple collections, with zero-development time, enabling your target audience to quickly preview and download your media files individually or download a zip file of any selected collection at once.
Like shared collections, your media portal is automatically generated, and automatically updated with the contents of the included collections. And your portal viewers enjoy the same easy preview and downloading options.
With the media portal, you can share as many collections as you want with easy navigating between collections and a friendly user-experience in both full screen and mobile views.
You can take advantage of the media portal for a variety of purposes. You can send the link to your standalone media portal, or you can embed the portal URL within a page in your website, enabling that page to be updated regularly by the relevant team(s) with no need to coordinate with web developers. Your target audience for your portal might be end-users, resellers, vendors, partners, third parties, or even internal teams and co-workers.
We'll share a few neat use case ideas here, but there's really no end to how your media portal can be used.
Brand Portal
Create a Brand Portal to distribute your branding media. For example, add and update various versions of your corporate and product logos, approved fonts, video intros/outros, and more.
The materials are always accessible and easily downloadable by stakeholders, an especially important step during rebranding.
Here's a simplified example of a Brand Portal for Cloudinary brand assets, just to give you an idea.
New Product Launches
Create collections with the final graphics of your upcoming product launches, and make your Product Launch Portal available to graphic designers, ad agencies, PR contacts, and social media teams.
These teams and contacts will love having an up-to-date spot where they always know they can find and download the latest approved graphics for use in their printed media designs, blog posts and news articles, campaign promotions, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram posts, etc.
Gallery
Show off photos and videos of your restaurants, hotels, event halls, real estate offerings, etc.
With a Gallery Portal, it would be a snap to get the latest photos from your site photographer, approved via our DAM internal sharing and commenting features, and then up live to your customers by simply adding the approved new collection to your Portal when ready. It's just as easy to drag new photos into your live portal and in front of your target audience on the spot.
Event Photos
Create an Event Portal to share photos and videos from the shiny event, meetup, or conference you just hosted. Alternatively, you might take this idea in-house and let your HR team use the portal to publish photos and videos of your employee events so they can always see or download these memories and share them with their families and friends.
Whatever the event, we suggest you give your event participants the link to your portal at the beginning of the event, and they'll be able to watch & refresh the site to see new pics and videos in real-time as you upload & categorize them into the relevant collections.
Here's what our ImageCon 2019 participants might have seen on their phone if we'd had the Portal back then. Click on it to see the live version of this sample portal.
Just the Beginning
The shared visual collection feature has just been rolled out and is available to any Cloudinary DAM customer with multiple users.
The media portal features we've shown you here are currently in Beta and available for our premium DAM customers (those on a custom plan) to try. Let us know if you'd like us to activate this new Portal feature for your DAM account so you can check it out and start taking advantage of it within your organization or outside.
But what we've described today is just the tip of the iceberg. There's lots more in the pipeline for both of these features, and you can help us prioritize what's most important for you. Tell us if your top needs are password protection, usage analytics, customized branding, multiple portals for different purposes, more role & permission functionality, or quick sharing directly to social media. Or maybe, after you start playing with these features and start to grasp their potential, you might have other cool suggestions. We're waiting for your great ideas!
Two New Collaboration Options, One Source of Truth
Traditional DAM solutions enable you to store and manage your assets, but when those assets are ready to be shared outside that system, you often need to turn to other alternatives. A dynamic DAM platform like Cloudinary helps you maintain a single source of truth throughout the entire asset life-cycle from asset creation all the way to end-user consumption.
In today's crazy times especially, asynchronous collaboration on media assets across both local and global teams all on wildly different time schedules has become an essential tool for efficient workflows.
By making Cloudinary's shared collections and media portal a standard part of your DAM collaboration arsenal, you'll quickly be a step ahead of your game, and you can get back to those kids who are STILL not sharing their toys, candy, (or whatever it happens to be at the moment).
Good luck on both fronts!
Want to Learn More About Digital Asset Management?
- What is Digital Asset Management and Why It Matters for Organizations
- Reimaging DAM: The next-generation solution for marketing & development
- Digital Asset Collaboration be DAM'd
- Adding Structure to Your Asset Metadata
- Automate Your Media Assets’ Workflow With Machine Learning
- API for extracting semantic image data - colors, faces, Exif data and more
- The Evolution of Digital Asset Management Systems: On-Premise, Cloud, Dynamic
- Media Asset Management and Enterprise Content Management: What’s the Difference?
- Digital Asset Managers: What They Do and Why You Need One
- Digital Asset Management Software: A Buyer’s Guide
- DAM Best Practices and Critical Success Factors
- A unified approach to DAM across the asset lifecycle
- How a cloud-native DAM optimizes customer experiences
- Bringing the Digital Ecosystem Together with a DAM Platform
- Don’t let your digital assets become a liability!
