Organizing media assets for presentations
November 16, 2016 10:20 AM Subscribe
I often assist with finding assets for executive presentations such as images, videos, and links. It would be great to organize these so they are easy to find and reuse. I'd prefer to do this with a simple, common set of tools such as Google apps or Dropbox.
I know there are dedicated digital asset management systems, but I would rather build upon a simple systems we already have instead of signing up for something new. I want it to be easy for me and others to view and search assets on computer or mobile.
So far I've tried Dropbox and Google Drive. To give you an idea of what I'm looking for, here's what I found with those tools:
Dropbox lets you search within a folder, but it doesn't search comments so there's not a great way to tag / add additional search words without creating a ridiculously long filename. But I like that you can drag URLs from your browser, making it easy to save websites and links to videos.
Google Drive lets you add descriptions to your files, and these can be searched, but you can't search within a folder (and I have a ton of other files in there, so this is a problem).
I tried using Adobe Bridge to browse the Dropbox folder on my computer, but I can't add metadata to all file types and it would only live on my computer anyway. I also thought about creating a Google Spreadsheet that lists all the assets, but I'd lose the ability to preview images and it would be labor intensive to maintain a list with filenames.
Another idea I considered: creating a Google Site and adding each item on a separate page with keywords. This would be functional and searchable but it seems clumsy to me, and I'm not sure how easy it will be to download original versions of images or videos.
Has anyone done something similar that worked well? Can you think of another way to hack these tools to make them work better for this purpose?
I know there are dedicated digital asset management systems, but I would rather build upon a simple systems we already have instead of signing up for something new. I want it to be easy for me and others to view and search assets on computer or mobile.
So far I've tried Dropbox and Google Drive. To give you an idea of what I'm looking for, here's what I found with those tools:
Dropbox lets you search within a folder, but it doesn't search comments so there's not a great way to tag / add additional search words without creating a ridiculously long filename. But I like that you can drag URLs from your browser, making it easy to save websites and links to videos.
Google Drive lets you add descriptions to your files, and these can be searched, but you can't search within a folder (and I have a ton of other files in there, so this is a problem).
I tried using Adobe Bridge to browse the Dropbox folder on my computer, but I can't add metadata to all file types and it would only live on my computer anyway. I also thought about creating a Google Spreadsheet that lists all the assets, but I'd lose the ability to preview images and it would be labor intensive to maintain a list with filenames.
Another idea I considered: creating a Google Site and adding each item on a separate page with keywords. This would be functional and searchable but it seems clumsy to me, and I'm not sure how easy it will be to download original versions of images or videos.
Has anyone done something similar that worked well? Can you think of another way to hack these tools to make them work better for this purpose?
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posted by helloimjennsco at 5:50 AM on November 18, 2016 [1 favorite]