With the right platform and tools, software developers can code ideas into useful products and services. The same scenario applies to graphic and UI designers, who are now equipped with a wealth of sophisticated tools, e.g., Sketch, Figma, and InVision, with which to create first-rate app designs.
All that has brought about an era in which many folks depend on software developers and designers to bring ideas to fruition. Full-fledged development projects, however, need other expertise. A whole team of professionals, including engineers, designers, architects, product managers, and nontechnical personnel, must collaborate and seamlessly share digital assets (images and videos) without interrupting the communication flow. For starters, those professionals need folder permissions, transparency for version control, and such, which call for an overarching solution for managing digital assets.
Introduction to Digital Asset Management
A solution for digital asset management (DAM) is a visual platform on which a team can effectively work together on a project or a series of projects during their interim phases. With easy-to-use Representative State Transfer (REST) APIs on Cloudinary’s cloud-based dynamic DAM platform, you can programmatically add capabilities for uploading, manipulating, optimizing, delivering, and presenting images and videos to your app or website. All the changes that are subsequently made to your digital assets are immediately transparent to everyone on the team.
For the longest time, Cloudinary was assumed to be just a developer-centric tool, as I pointed out below during my #25DaysOfMediaMagic:
Day 23: I discovered that lots of folks think only developers can use the media tricks I have mentioned since Day 1.
— Prosper Otemuyiwa (@unicodeveloper) December 24, 2019
That’s a false narrative.
No, you don’t have to know code, all your team members can manage digital assets via the dashboard/DAM solution #25DaysOfMediaMagic
Make no mistake, Cloudinary’s DAM platform is all inclusive, enabling development, creative, and marketing departments to collaborate at all levels of the workflow. That encompasses all the tasks involved, from uploading photos and videos to tagging and sharing them, performing sophisticated searches to find just the right assets for a new design or campaign, and to selecting the final assets, ready for delivery to your website or mobile app. Throughout the process, all your team members, not just developers and designers, can upload, store, organize, search and browse, share and collaborate, manipulate and optimize, and, ultimately, deliver digital assets on Cloudinary’s intuitive interface.
A DAM Use Case
Here's a typical use case for Cloudinary's DAM solution. Ever since the Internet became ubiquitous, companies have been grappling with the challenge of delivering a compelling, fast-performing experience for their web properties. Traditionally, it's a manual process that requires mapping images and their variants to the website and product type through spreadsheets. That’s a tedious, painstaking, and error-prone job, let alone that it causes maintenance nightmares and often delays product launches. Plus, as technical projects grow, multiple stakeholders—content developers, engagement strategists, brand strategists, designers, product managers—must join the effort, further complicating the picture.
Many companies have since adopted Cloudinary’s DAM solution, which automates workflow with up to an 80-percent increase in delivery rates, resulting in efficiency, high performance, and peace of mind in managing rich media. It truly makes a world of a difference!
Cloudinary’s DAM Features
Cloudinary’s DAM platform boasts many robust and nifty features: rapid multiple uploads, AI-based content analysis, role-based user management, access control, dynamic image and video transformations, metadata control, advanced search and discovery. In a series of upcoming posts, I’ll explain them in detail and show you how to leverage them for your projects.
Stay tuned!
DAM for Developers: Series
- Why Cloudinary’s Solution for Digital Asset Management Matters for Developers
- DAM for Developers: AI-Based Content Analysis
- DAM for Developers: Access Control
- DAM for Developers: Advanced Search and Discovery
- DAM for Developers: Asset Metadata ___
Further Reading on Digital Asset Management
- The Ultimate Digital Asset Management Guide
- Reimaging DAM: The next-generation solution for marketing & development
- A unified approach to DAM across the asset lifecycle
- How a cloud-native DAM optimizes customer experiences
- Rise above the noise with dynamic visual experiences
- Auto AI content recognition tagging in Cloudinary DAM
- Image fingerprinting identify similar images using pHash
- How to create attractive PDF thumbnails - for PDF cover page and internal pages
- An intuitive RESTful HTTP administrative API provides control to programmatically manage assets
- Learn how to leverage Cloudinary's cloud-based API for applying effects on images to automatically blur faces using the pixelate effect
